The best bossfights of the last 24 years: Dark Souls, Nioh, Mortal Kombat and more

A boss fight is the highlight of any game. This is the highest point of involvement and ownership, this is an emotional peak. And for the gameplay it is also a challenge of the maximum level, a challenge to skill and a test of skills. A good boss fight is, at the end of the day, an adrenaline rush and just the pure joy of victory. In this article, we look back at some of the most iconic boss battles in gaming of the last 24 years.

Of course, such a text will be subjective by definition. So if there isn't a bossfight here that you consider the standard, then welcome to the comments!

Perhaps the most obvious way to make a boss fight memorable is to visually surprise the player. The most obvious, but not the simplest, because for this you need to release an opponent with an extremely unusual appearance into the arena, or at least give the player a performance on the level of Michael Bay in his best years.

Hidetaka Miyazaki populated his games with dozens (hundreds?) of monsters of extraordinary appearance. But I would like to highlight the Opening Dragon from Dark Souls. When calm, this creature resembles a cross between a crocodile and a bat. For fantasy fans, this is an ordinary little animal. But the dragon's chest and belly are made of solid fangs that fly open during an attack. The monster literally turns itself inside out, trying to send the player to the next «You Died!» inscription. The spectacle is especially for the strong-willed. By the way, by some irony, the Opening Dragon is the easiest boss in Dark Souls. Although the most terrible one.

A worthy project of a similar genre, Nioh also has a lot of creepy creatures in store for the player. Among the bosses of Nioh there are plenty of characters that you could easily dream of in a nightmare, for example, an ugly ogre. But we will highlight the giant centipede from the miner level. And an ordinary centipede in real life is not the most pleasant sight. And in Nioh, samurai William is attacked by a creature the length of a trolleybus.

The segmented body, abundance of claws and huge mandibles cause disgust at the subconscious level. And given that we're dealing with a youkai demon, the centipede's head is a distorted human skull. And this rubbish destroys three-quarters of your health with one bite!

Let's continue the theme of arthropods: next up is the Snow Butterfly boss from Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. The game's artists did a great job: the animal has the usual features of a cute insect, but adjusted for its clearly predatory nature. The butterfly from Lost Planet sticks out a huge belly, studded with spines, and long clawed paws, clearly intended for tearing apart its prey. This bossfight takes place against the backdrop of the sunset sky and the end result is a very spectacular spectacle.

A good bossfight doesn't need proper staging. I immediately remember the plot twist from Prey (2006).

In Prey, Earthling Tommy and his girlfriend Jen are abducted by aliens. Tommy makes his way through a huge ship to save his beloved. But the aliens have already fused her body with a metal monster. The fight begins and Jen, conscious, screams in fear and begs Tommy to save her. But there is no happy ending. For this scene alone, it was worth enduring all the shortcomings of the game.

The most famous criminal of the Galaxy Riddick in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena ends up on the slave ship «Dark Athena». After a long journey to freedom, Riddick will have to fight with the bitchy lady Gail Revas, the captain of the ship. Revas is dressed in a combat suit, but after a difficult fight, Riddick manages to throw her into a deep shaft. The hero manages to grab Gail's hand, she hangs over the abyss — the strongest chemistry between the characters! But the opponent lets go of Riddick's hand and disappears into the darkness, she is too proud and stubborn. In terms of cinematography, the games about Riddick surpassed the films about him, that's a fact.

A smart developer will definitely think about a bossfight arena. The eight-bit days when you could fight a villain simply against a black background are long gone. Sometimes the scenery is more memorable than the boss itself.

In the adrenaline shooter Painkiller, the main character Daniel will end up straight in hell, where the final boss awaits him. The meeting takes place near a besieged medieval fortress, where time has frozen and the battle has frozen forever. Arrows hang in the air, the catapult stops in its swing, the stone tower freezes at the moment of collapse. The bossfight itself was pretty ordinary, but the scenery was very cool.

Time Mistress Kronika, the final boss of Mortal Kombat 11, during the battle, moves the arena from her palace to the Jurassic jungle, where dinosaurs hunt. Looks very cool. In Gears of War 2, Marcus Fenix's squad kills a giant worm from the inside, among its mucus and organs. The Witcher Geralt in The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone had to fight a boss with the complex nickname Iris's Biggest Fear in a world of sorrowful memories, where space and sound are distorted. It turned out to be an uncomfortable and atmospheric bossfight.

But the fun begins when the developers add fresh gameplay mechanics to the bossfight.

So, in its time, the second game of the popular series Serious Sam became an excellent work on bugs. In the first part, the final bossfight was characterized by absurdity: Sam couldn't just shoot the giant minotaur, he had to jump through rings and do all sorts of nonsense. But in The Second Encounter, the boss fights turned out to be really powerful. In the battle with the Indian wind god Kukulkan, we had to withstand a real hurricane. The huge column of the tornado easily swallowed bullets and Sam had to select the right weapon: for example, cover Kukulkan with explosions of pirate cannonballs.

Kratos from the God of War series got some very interesting boss fights. It is worth remembering the striking beginning of the second numbered part. There the Spartan fights with one of the seven wonders of the world — the Colossus of Rhodes. The giant statue is trying to flatten Kratos, but the nimble Spartan is also no stranger. To win, you need to charge the ballista with yourself and shoot directly at the Colossus's head, where Kratos will reach the vulnerable eye. It was a very fresh experience: fighting a boss whose little finger is larger than the hero. And another very powerful boss fight awaited the Spartan in God of War 3. Titan Kron was so large that the hero crawled on it like an ant. And the decisive blow had to be struck from within—in the literal sense of the word.

One cannot help but recall such classics as Shadow of the Colossus. An unprecedented gaming feature there was climbing over the gigantic bodies of titans. To get to the vulnerable point, the main character Vander sometimes had to climb to the height of a high-rise building. The process was fascinating and complex: if the endurance was calculated incorrectly, Vander could fail.

Bossfight was great in Ghostbusters: The Video Game. There, the Rookie had to hang upside down from the wall of a skyscraper in order to defeat the legendary Marshmallow Man. Blood Rayne had an extraordinary fight with the final boss in the first BloodRayne. In this game, an ancient predatory god was constantly growing inside the temple, and the vampire had to defeat him before the monster's swelling body smeared her across the walls. Resident Evil 5 has a great boss fight on a ship. Redfield needs to aim a satellite weapon at a giant mutant (the former Excella Gionne, yeah), simultaneously shooting back at the monsters and hurrying until the monster drags the ship to the bottom.

There were amazing boss fights in the action game Psi-Ops: Mindgate Conspiracy. In one fight, the telepathic boss threw no less than railway tanks at the hero. I had to move around like a snake to avoid getting hurt. In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the boss was the huge cruiser Star Destroyer, that same wedge-shaped space giant. The main character had to drag the ship to the surface of the planet with the help of the Force, and at the same time fight off fighters. And we'll definitely remember the old lady Diablo 2 — for the jump in difficulty of fantastic power: we methodically chopped up the evil spirits for several hours to get to Andariel and instantly die from the four scorpion tails of the demoness.

Sometimes game designers create such conditions for a boss fight that the fight is memorable, even if the boss does not shine with design, and there is nothing special to look at in the arena.

In the classic RPG Planescape: Torment, before the battle with the final boss we had a long conversation, on which the start of the battle depended. And this was not just an exchange of remarks; Planescape became famous as a «conversational» RPG. To blurt out an unnecessary (and unobvious) phrase, some of our fellow party members, with whom we walked shoulder to shoulder for dozens of hours, easily went over to the side of the enemy.

In Dragon Age: Origins we fought in the final with the nasty-looking dragon Archdemon. Allies rushed to our aid from all over the continent. And we saw with our own eyes everyone we were able to gather under our banners over more than a hundred hours of play. Dragon Age: Origins was non-linear, and elf archers or brutal gnomes went into battle with us. Or werewolves with templars. Or all together with different variations. The decisive blows were, of course, dealt by the player's team, but the allies were not scenery at all. The Archdemon should not have crawled out of the ground.

In last year's hit Remnant: From the Ashes, the final boss fight was remembered for some fresh features. The sleeper was an almost bulletproof monster. From time to time, he threw the player into another dimension, where ordinary monsters rolled in in waves. At any moment one could emerge back to the Sleeper. But the nuance was that the more privates the player killed, the more the «general» would get it. This is the winning strategy, albeit not obvious, but interesting.

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We have defeated all kinds of opponents over the past twenty years: from giant ancient statues to ancient demons straight from hell, powerful as death itself. Well, it was all the more pleasant to send them back to where they came from. But the most interesting boss battles are probably still ahead of us!