I played the first few bosses of Bananner Nababber today. Lovely experience, would recommend others do the same (it's free!). This led to some thoughts on the Boss Rush.
We've kind of broadened the definition of Boss Rush, haven't we? The earliest version of it I can remember was usually a post-game unlockable that let you fight a game's bosses in sequence, omitting everything in between. Now we have loads of games that are just "one long boss rush", focused on making big interesting fights that functionally are the levels. The idea, ideally, is that this would be a game of nothing but the "best parts" of other games.
That quite doesn't work though, does it? Don't get me wrong I enjoy a boss rush game, and it's been interesting to see it come to tabletop in the form of games like Vagrantsong or Kingdom Death (both of which I have huge problems with but that's not the point right now). The problem with having your game be nothing but the "best part" on loop is that no game can pull that off. You're going to have ups and downs, favorites and leasts, great fights and awful hair pulling fun ruiners. Boss Rush, as a subgenre, is like trading in your bag of snack mix for the bag of nothing but the rye chips. Yeah it's great at first, but eventually you hit some that are less good and your teeth hurt.
