Summary
More often than not, a video game ends with one last boss battle to test everything the player has learned along the way. They’ll take more hits and deal more punishment, but once they’re done, the player will reach the finale and (bar any side quests or achievements) be done with the game.
But that’s not always the case. That final encounter may have something more to them than a challenging fight. They may throw new mechanics to learn, require thinking outside the box to defeat, or won’t actually put up a challenge at all. For one reason or another, these final bosses subverted the player’s expectations and gave them a more unorthodox fight.
The originalStarfoxwas a revelationback in the SNES days. Thanks to the Super FX chip, it brought 3D polygons to the 16-bit machine. Its simplistic graphics still have an abstract charm to them today, though the slow frame rate makes it harder to play compared toStarfox 64and its 3DS remake. Still, the final boss, Andross, was freakier as a strange polygonal face, be it a vaguely human one or the bull-cat one from the hard difficulty.
However, he’s not the only final boss in the game. If players went through the effort to reach the secret “Out of This Dimension” level, they’d eventually come across a giant slot machine. Shooting its reels will produce all sorts of symbols, some of which produce coins, and others attacks. If the player manages to get 777, they’ll defeat the machine and have a big THE END machine they can shoot forever, or until they reset the SNES.
Some fans may be wondering howFinal Fantasy 10’s final boss is all that strange. Braska’s Final Aeon is freaky looking and difficult to fight, requiring keen strategy to defeat. That’s pretty traditional forFFgames. But the Aeon is not the final boss. Fans just consider him the final boss because the true last foe, Yu Yevon, is more like some last-minute clean-up than a challenge.
The older games would sometimes surprise players with an even more evil and challenging last boss, like Zeromus inFF4.FF10turns that on its head by making its equivalent deliberately weak. He isn’t completely simple, but the player’s party members automatically get revived if they die, and Yevon can’t do anything about it. After being responsible for everything in the plot and being praised as a god, his boss fight is the punchline to the joke.
Undertalehas different final bosses depending on which path the player takes. Neutral paths will pit them against Flowey’s freakish monster form while being Pacifist will bring outhis true identity as Asriel Dreemur. Both are fairly tricky, requiring quick reflexes and quicker thinking to defeat. Taking the Genocide route changes things considerably, as Sans, the skeleton from all the memes, reveals his true power.
He’ll mix up old obstacles with new threats like the Gaster Blasters. Or he’ll feign mercy to trick the player into his instant kill move (“Geeettttttt dunked on!!!”). If the player manages to last against his onslaught, he’ll even disable the menu to trap the player in a dead game. They can’t beat the game if they can’t fight back. But he’ll eventually fall asleep, and the player can slowly shift the Bullet Board to the Fight command. Hit it once, and Sans is done.
BeforeUndertalebecame the big cult classic RPG full of memes, there wasEarthboundorMother 2as it was called in Japan. The series was a big deal in its home country butfaltered in the Westdue to its limited release, curious marketing, and even more curious content. Alien barf monsters? Angry road signs? A man who dreams of becoming an RPG dungeon? It’s a little too strange for a 1990s TV commercial.
Especially when Giygas turns up and shifts the tone considerably. Originally a spindly alien inMother 1/Earthbound Beginnings, he becomes something inexplicable trapped in “the Devil’s Machine.” Once unleashed, he’s an incomprehensible screaming face that turns a cutesy Nintendo game into a nightmare. The only way out is to pray via Paula’s command, which slowly but surely works. This isn’t difficult, but it’s powerful as a storytelling device.
Most players nowadays know Suda51 for theNo More Heroesseries. But that wasn’t his first introduction to the West, nor ofNMH’s cel-shaded art style. He worked with Shinji Mikami and Capcom to makeKiller7, a branching shooter about the titular organization and the Heaven Smiles. LikeEarthbound, it was too strange to be profitable, but strange enough to become a cult classic.
How strange does it get? Its final boss is the dead body of Greg Nightmare, the US Secretary of Education whose lower half produces Black Heaven Smiles that kill off 6 of the Killer7s. Unless one counts Last Shot Smile, where the last member, Emir Parkreiner, corners the last Heaven Smile to an island. They turn out to be Iwazaru, the gimp-looking guy who provided exposition in the other missions and may have been the villain Kun Lun in disguise.
Perhaps it takes a deliberately weird game to have deliberately weird boss fights, asUndertale,Earthbound, andKiller7show. But on the surface,Drakengardis a fairly standard medieval-themed slasher and shooter. It’s just the narrative that gets increasingly bizarre and messed up with cannibal elves, bigoted monks, and giant monster babies. Yet they’re not its strangest final boss. That would be their mother, the Queen Beast.
In Chapter 13, they’ll warp to modern Tokyo and fight it off in a bizarre rhythm battle where the player has to match the Beast’s energy waves in tune with the music. Except the music is deliberately discordant, and the camera occasionally makes it harder to see the waves. The player has to beat the game 100% to access this battle, and their reward for doing all that is getting blown out of the sky by the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force.Thanks for playing!
Drakengard’s Ending E canonically led to theNiergames. However, the threads that connectDrakengardtoNierare longer and thinner than the ones that connectNier toNier Automata. It’s more action-based, though no less grim or melancholic, as the androids learn the true nature of their fight with the robots. The last mainline ending, Ending E, is much more sympathetic than its forebears.
It leads to a top-down shooter against the end credits, which soon turns into bullet hell as the scrolling names fill the screen with projectiles. If the player dies five times, the game will offer them help from other players, which comes in the form of extra pods to fire back. It comes with a catch though: once it’s over, the game will ask the player to sacrifice their save file to let their pod help others in need. At least it’s optional, unlike the firstNier.
The modernFalloutgames are perhaps better known now, but the original Black Isle RPGs are more fondly remembered. Aside from their unique wasteland exploration and mechanics, their stories were stronger by comparison.Fallout 3’snoble sacrifice endingwas spoiled by logic (why can’t the guy immune to radiation go into the irradiated Purifier?). WhileFallout 1’s final boss,the Master of the Super Mutants, can be subverted by logic.
His plan was to turn everyone in the wasteland into mutants with the Forced Evolutionary Virus. Players could take him on directly or sneak a nuke into his base to finish him off. But if they have a high Speech or Intelligence skill, they can point out the flaw in the Master’s big plan: his Mutants would be sterile and thus die off after a single generation. Realizing his plan was a waste, he’ll blow himself up. Proof that working smarter can be better than working harder.
