I think one of the things that I see often is an 'assessment' made by onlookers about boss designs in games that they don't realize are pretty juvenile or simplistic in their claims. I was watching a buddy play Freedom Planet (which I fucking adore btw) and they're....eh, I'd say 60-ish% of the way cleared and they reached a boss that uses lava guns, can set platforms on fire, all of that. When all of a sudden I hear:
"Yea, this is a pretty poorly designed boss; you can just stay up top."
And I think what was forgotten here is that that is true for almost....any Sonic and Mario-esque boss is that with one or two tricks, you can make a boss trivial.
That is the point.
The caveat however, is that you have to find what those one or two tricks are. Be it a specific placement, a certain move, a specific item, etc.
Low key it was obvious the claim was about the difficulty of the boss-but that's a can of worms I'm tired of opening because my final thought on that entire topic is not every boss has to be hard, it doesn't even need to always be super challenging, and honestly not every game dev is catering to gamers (nor wants to) who have been around the block and know a lot of the tricks in the book. Freedom Planet is very much a game where the more 'mature' content is in the story proper (and if you know YOU KNOW). It doesn't lend itself to needing a boss that requires grinding, or six things to open up, or a hit box the size of a fart-it's a game meant to be zipped around in and done quickly. The occasional cheese boss is....very fine, actually. As a matter of fact I welcome it. Sometimes I want that easy as fuck win because ya bitch be tired.
As gamers I think we've hit this very fucking weird spot where because many of us are adults we expect everything to be as, poorly worded as it may be, 'adulty as possible.' When in reality, again as simplistic as it may be: my guy we are playing video games. The end goal is always that we have a good time. We project what our favorite things/preferences are onto every game we touch now. I'm not allowed to JUST like Sonic Frontiers; I HAVE to open the floor to weirdos who want to be turbo angry at it because 'well the game is too easy, with the same set of moves you can beat everything' and like I just....do not fucking care. Sonic Frontiers was made with an end goal of running around hella fast as a hedgehog saving your friends and collecting emeralds to beat up titans and piss off Robotnik. It did what it was supposed to do. I don't know how to politely, anymore, say that if your games always have to be X challenge, then to be honest you can just remove yourself from some genres. Or you can go hit the retro circuit. I'm sure the PS1 era games will have all the 'rish' challenge you could feasibly beg for.
Good boss design goes much, much further than 'did this challenge me': it also has to answer questions like
- does this boss thematically fit here?
- does this boss have a purpose of being here in this precise spot?
- is this boss meant to teach the player something? If yes, what and how?
- is this boss relevant to the story being told? If so, to what degree?
- is there something beyond story progression for completing this boss?
- if this boss' job is to be a wall, is that clear? Have we signposted that well?
- does this boss fit in this game in general?
and there can be far more questions, I'm sure, but those are what I made off the top of my head.
Even in everyone's favorite difficulty topic of Souls games, these bosses answer similar questions before the challenge aspect is on the table; there are many bosses who 100%, absolutely, without remorse, are meant to be cheesed to shit. The second you discovered the way you 'beat' Wolnir was by breaking the bracelets, there is no one-and I mean fucking no one-who caught that and said 'meh, I'd rather do it organically, it's a bigger challenge and feels more fun'. Even no-hit challenge runners and speedrunners would disagree with that because you can add challenge in your own way by other means that doesn't force you into a situation where you're now whacking at Wolnir' for the next 45 minutes (and if you want to argue that miss me, I'm not here to stroke your ego about all the keyboards you broke, the controllers you threw, or the blood vessels you popped over a video game). Wolnir's boss design, to be clear, is excellent-not because it's an easy fight once you figure out the bracelet strat, but because by following the lore you'd know that the bracelets are what keeps Wolnir attached and living in this accursed plane, that the bracelets are what permit him to persist as a tyrannical giant that serves as a Lord of Cinder. That the only way Wolnir will actually die is if you destroy his bracelets. His move kit is crafted explicitly to force you to dodge and align with the bracelets, to take advantage of his arms being on the ground for extended periods of time, and if you try to run up and hit him on his upper body, his kit has multiple pushes and AoE, that can stack, to drop the hint that 'no you jackass, you literally don't want to be in this area.' The bracelets call DIRECTLY to the story of why you're even chasing down the Lords of Cinder in the first place. They're also ugly as fuck.
And right behind him is Pontiff, who will be more than ecstatic to provide all that challenge you were missing with Wolnir.
Everything doesn't have to go back to the Mega Man school of bosses where if you didn't somehow figure out that each boss had a specific weakness that you had to follow a precise order for, then yes you were more than welcome to stumble fuck your behind through levels that beat your ass just to wind up at a boss that JoJo'd you into frustration. But I tell you what: once you figured out the route, I bet you didn't go back to playing it the harder way 'just because'-and reader, I cannot stress to you enough that there is a reason for that.
So no, that wasn't poor boss design: you just....didn't care for the boss because you wanted something a touch more challenging. I'd rather you just say that. Not to mention Serpentine (FINAL), THAT BOSS FIGHT (iykyk), and then the final boss itself are all there with plenty of points in frustration waiting for you. Even the dragon right after is a bit of a nuisance. This also completely disregards the levels you're running to get to this boss: crushers, more platforming, swimming, lower health markers, precision based dragon boosts if you're Lilac, enemies that can shave 3-4 health in a single move, lava waves.....you go through a LOT to get there, and it shapes the rest of the platforming for the game. The difficulty curve in the game doesn't let up and is very much still in an upward trend. You start the game clearing levels in 2-3 minutes and by the time you get here, a 10 minute level isn't uncommon.
That lava boss is effectively a fucking breather, and I think having the fight where a doofy little robot is trying it's best with it's little lava laser beams can hang out just fine where, and as, it is.
