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Best bosses in Western Developed games?

jett said:
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Arkham City had some great bosses, particularly Mr Freeze.
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Some good bosses?! That's literally the only not bad boss fight in the whole series!
 
Tye The Czar said:
Undertale. No set of bosses I've seen have played a bigger narrative role nor pushed their simple mechanics to such limits. Mettaton and
Sans
alone are worth putting this game in top 10 lists for boss battles. I'll admit that they can drag on and how sparing a couple of them are difficult to figure out, but the good far outweighs the bad.
I'm still salty that it never made it into Watch Mojo's Top 10.
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Oh my god, I can't believe I didn't think of this while reading up to this post. Of course Undertale counts! Such a great game. The boss fights almost made me as exhilarated as DMC or Platinum (or Metroid Prime) fights, and the game does it in a hybrid turn based RPG system instead of a high paced action game. There are actually an incredible number of excellent boss fights in western games and I feel like this thread does a good job showing that.
 
David from the last of us. hands down the only boss battle ND got right last gen and it was such an intense experience. Best cutscene of the game follows after the end of the battle too.
 
There's a plethora of World of Warcraft raid bosses I could list. Lei Shen, Ragnaros (Firelands), Sinestra, Al'Akir, The Lich King, Yogg-Saron, the list goes on and on.
 
Metroid Prime Trilogy is filled to the brim with great bosses

Undertale's bosses are all great. Such creativity and consistency in boss quality is so rare.

I also gotta throw in another vote for Mr. Freeze from Arkham City.
Such a great boss fight in a series full of disappointing boss fights
 
As I just finished this game, even though there weren't any particular hard bosses, there are two which I liked.

Wailing Host - Darksiders 2

Not very hard but definitely a nice surprise with this Cthulhu-like boss.

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Guardian - Darksiders 2

Epic music and this guy being a giant were really cool mixes, though he's quite easy, still nice to fight.

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NinjamicWZ said:
LittleBigPlanet bosses can be excellent. The Collector in LBP1, Mecha Lex in the DC pack, the Cakeling in the Move Pack, Rex in the MGS pack, all the bosses in LBP Vita etc. Good stuff, classics for the fans especially.
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Ah that's right. The LBP series has had plenty of well designed boss fights; moreso than a lot of classic 2D sidescrollers.

I'm willing to admit the series' core platforming controls leave a lot to be desired, but I really can't knock how fun and clever the bosses can be.
 
BlizzKrut said:
As I just finished this game, even though there weren't any particular hard bosses, there are two which I liked.

Wailing Host - Darksiders 2

Not very hard but definitely a nice surprise with this Cthulhu-like boss.

maxresdefault.jpg


Guardian - Darksiders 2

Epic music and this guy being a giant were really cool mixes, though he's quite easy, still nice to fight.

0603.jpg
Click to expand...

as someone who has never played darksiders, i finally understand why they call it zelda-esque
 
Breads said:
Third option - you aren't used to playing in good guilds and are easily amused.

No longer being enchanted by MMO raiding is not the same thing as being inexperienced in them. The mechanics that encourage the toxic bullshit response that you gave does not impress me. Nothing you said made a good case for why I should like raids. The only thing your post made a good case for is why I don't like people who are still hung up on them.
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I don't give a shit if you like raids, raiding as an activity you like or dislike has relatively little to do with the quality of the boss design. The fact that you try to dismiss them as 'just numbers' is telling. The fact that you try to dismiss what I'm saying by attacking me is telling. I could care less if you 'like' people like me, if you have a point to make then make it, this post I'm quoting is literally just "I dismiss your opinions and viewpoints because I don't like you."

Yes, there are numbers involved, and a good fight is going to be tuned tightly around them, but if those were what made bosses interesting every boss might as well be patchwerk. Good boss design is going to be about forcing a player to do things outside of their comfort zone and adapt themselves to the situation at hand. Regardless of genre. You've already taught the player how to play the game and use their skills, and now the boss is there to force them to show mastery over them. In an MMO this often means putting out high numbers (damage/healing) as a group, while also applying them in the right places at the right times (burst phases, target swaps, aoe, etc) and coordinating together, as it is a collaborative group type of design, while also dealing with nuances and twists thrown at you by the game.

So you've got your basic "Hey do X dps" boss, fine, it can even be hard, but ti's not an especially interesting design. Now throw in some type of shit you've got to move from, maybe you have to do it VERY quickly. Do X while moving and avoiding things, removing your concentration a bit from doing X as flawlessly. Now you throw in something like "Hey another boss spawns every 30 seconds and you need to do X+2 DPS to him very quickly when he spawns, so you're now doing X-2 the rest of the time in order to save some minor CDs, or finding some other way to coordinate so that you can push that X+2 every thirty seconds, while also avoiding death and doing X overall to the main boss". Keep adding mechanics that interact with those two, like maybe the main boss puts a shield on the X+2 mob if you don't interrupt it, so someone has to divide their attention to that, maybe there are other ground effects that make avoiding the first one harder and cause you to be less predictible with your movements. I'm being vague here because we're talking about the merits of boss design of an entire genre, but I hope I'm getting my point accross, since you seem to think I didn't before.

I have to laugh at the 'not used to playing in good guilds and easily amused' comment. Good guilds are the ones most likely to experience EXTREME hardship learning new bosses, they encounter them first with little insight going in, have the worst gear (thus make the number checks harder on themselves), and generally take more pulls to kill bosses than mid tier guilds that follow a few weeks behind, except for the very eays ones where the gear doesn't help much. The fact that you assume so much of me means you're either deluded about what a raid boss is and does, or about my personal skill level and those I choose to play with. No, I've never been in a literal world first guild, but I've been in world top 20 guilds plenty, I'm really not sure what you think it would alter about my opinion regardless: I've seen basically every boss in the past 9 years or so in the hardest iterations at the earliest levels of progression, I've got enough experience to know that things like "Mechancis encourage toxicity" like you're purporting are...ludicrous at best. Spending 50 attempts on a Dark Souls boss is determination but spending 500 on a Warcraft boss means I'm easily amused? I'm pretty sure it just means we're all extremely determined and having fun picking apart the puzzles and execution required to achieve a goal.
 
I've got 2 perhaps odd sources of bossfights

First off, Torchlight 2, I thought majority of the bosses were really great, Alchemist taking the cake
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Multi-stage boss that uses the same skills that the Alchemist class used to have in Torchlight 1. It felt like having a roided up PvP match

Then, Dawn of War 2, Chaos Rising campaign in particular
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Lots of great combat encounters, and it was impossible to fight all the bosses in one playthrough because one of the bosses near the end is dependant on how you handle the Corruption mechanic and there were 6 completely different possible bosses there. Martellus, Thaddeus, Cyrus, Tarkus, Jonah Orion and Avitus

Cave Johnson said:
Aside from Deus Ex in which triggers different sequences bases on how you approach a boss
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The final boss of original Deus Ex is one of the greats imo. The level itself is the boss
 
RandyRaceCar said:
Did you just ask me to list facts? How many western games were on the NES to compare to? 10?
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Rare alone had more than 10 releases on the NES.

There were many more western games, both original and PC ports, than most people are aware of on the 8/16/32 bit consoles. Some of the games being pretty good and well regarded, too. The "western developers didn't make console games till the original Xbox" is a silly lie that continues to be perpetuated.
 
I don't know about GoW bosses, from what I remember a lot of the bosses where just giant thing at the edge of the arena that either swung their giant easily avoidable appendage or smashing it's giant easily avoidable appendage while you wail away at either the appendage or the thing's chest or whatever before a giant o appeared over the thing to initiate a QTE. And the humanoid bosses weren't good from what I remember either. Zeus at the end of GoW2 was the most anti-climactic boss I've played.
 
Always loved the optional 2nd fight against Walton Simons in Deus Ex.

You think you eluded him and he comes out with a plasma rifle and says: "Hello Agent."
Pants crapping moment.
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Spieler Eins said:
Origins had some not-bad boss fights too.
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The most notable ones were on the overly-cinematic/QTE side (Firefly, Deathstroke). Killer Croc, Bane and Copperhead were fine, but pretty rudimentary. Having bosses based on the hand-to-hand gameplay doesn't beget great results in on-on-one fights considering the "freeflow" stuff only works with multiple opponents.

Freeze is legitimately great on hard mode. It uses the series' stronger predator gameplay (unlike every other boss), it doesn't limit the player's abilities/movement in arbitrary ways (like with Deathstroke) and it's challenging while staying true to the game's depiction of Batman.
 
Aureon said:
WoW fights were good, often excellent, but the MMO boss king is:

18adc0429bbf01d8e769394c892dbb8c.jpg

(Titan Hard\Ex, FFXIV)
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Yeah no, neither is FFXIV western developed nor does Titan Hard even come close to WoW's offering. If anything, take a look at Sephirot.

On that note, I think the Brawler's Guild in WoW is fantastic, while they're just designed to be 2 minute encounters I absolutely loved how creative the encounter designs were for each match they had. They were easily the best thing you could do in Mists of Pandaria, and I'm glad they brought it back for WoD.
 
Only good ones I can really note on is probably Blizzard, Illidan and Arthas are the pinnacle, when you fight them, it's nothing but top tier shit talk and lines for the ages.

Here I stand, the lion before the lambs, and they do not fear, they cannot fear!

The pacing of the lines and how they flow, nothing the west has can match that.

However, very few can match Armstrong.
 
mrmickfran said:
Tropical Freeze bosses were even worse than Returns' bosses.



I understand what you mean. But they're all killed the same way in Returns (besides World 7's boss, the only good boss).

But yeah they're an improvement over DKC's bosses, holy shit.
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Haven't played Tropical Freeze but recently went back to finish DKCR, made it to the final boss and didn't even want to finish it. I'd be surprised if retro ever pull something as impressive as prime off again :(
 
soheil said:
this :

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Oh heck no. Lords of Shadow did have some good boss fights, but the Titans were all of the worst parts of bad boss design rolled into one awful package. I hated those two boss fights. I did really like the last few bosses in the game though.
 
For being so bad at boss fights, people haven't had much difficulty coming up with a shitload of cool bosses from Western developers.

I think the main reason they're less prominent than in Japanese games is because bosses are rooted in an arcade tradition that was dominated by Japan.
 
I see a lot of citing of Shovel Knight and Axiom Verge in this thread... I loved both games but the bosses were definitely a weak part of both. Shovel Knight's boss battles could be easily brute-forced, Plague Knight and the final boss being some of the only ones that required pattern memorization. Axiom Verge's bosses looked amazing, but for the most part were HP sinks that did nothing but spam one or two easy-to-avoid patterns. (Except for the final battle, which was a clusterfuck).

Guacamelee, on the other hand, had some pretty decent boss battles. (if only the hitstun recovery time was a little less...)
 
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