Boss fights have existed for almost as long as video games have. They serve various purposes: defeating them may be required for story progression, or perhaps they’re optional, guarding rare loot. A fight may be against an entirely unique enemy, with new mechanics and animations, or it could be a tougher version of a similar foe you’ve already fought. They all have one thing in common though: winning a boss fight is one of the most satisfying things you can do as a player.
That’s all well and good when it’s a straightforward boss encounter. But not all of them are. Some bosses — I’m looking at you, FromSoftware and the Souls games — have a second (and sometimes even a third!) phase where the enemy essentially transforms into a more powerful version, complete with new attacks and animations. Oftentimes, they’ll also have an entirely new health bar, too.
It’s these specific multi-stage boss fights that I have an enormous gripe with. If the boss’s health doesn’t replenish, that’s fine, because expectations haven’t been subverted. But when you finally whittle a boss all the way down, only for it to enter a second stage where it heals during the mid-fight cutscene, yet you, the player, are not afforded that luxury? It evokes nothing but frustration and completely takes away from that feeling of achievement.
This is something I’ve felt strongly about for a long time, but it came to a head when I was fighting The Dancer in Control Resonant. This will likely be the second or third boss the player will fight in the action game, and let’s face it: The Dancer isn’t a particularly difficult boss. But it was still a pain in the ass to get through the first, considerably easier stage, only to then be confronted with a second, slightly tougher fight, because in my mind, the boss was beaten. I’d depleted its health. It should be dead!
Souls games are the most notorious for this, but personally, they’re the least frustrating to deal with, likely because they do it so often. I went into every single Elden Ring boss encounter with the knowledge that my enemy is likely to have some additional tricks up their sleeve, most commonly manifested as a second stage. The anticipation is baked in. But when it happens in a game that doesn’t have such an expectation, it’s like a kick to the stomach.
There’s also the issue that since the second phase of a boss fight is usually more difficult, that’s where players will struggle more, and need to study the big bad’s moveset to best them. But if you can only learn when you’ve gotten through the first stage every time, it feels like an almost arbitrary barrier. That’s made ten times worse when the first stage of the fight is also difficult as hell, because then you actually have a challenge on your hands before you can work on the second part of the fight.
It is possible for games to “correctly” feature two-stage boss fights, though. Take the Ganondorf fight from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, for example. The first stage is against Demon King Ganondorf – The Menace Unleashed, and at that point, he’s basically just a bloke. He doesn’t have any special moves, and he’s not particularly beefy.
When you defeat this phase, he transforms into Demon King Ganondorf – Master of the Secret Stone, and you get to watch his health bar extend beyond the confines of the screen, implying he’s stronger than reality. It makes him seem incredibly intimidating, and frankly, it’s quite cheeky. But even in this stage, despite having plenty of new abilities, it isn’t a particularly tough boss fight. Just an iconic one that proves multi-stage boss fights can be done well… they just aren’t most of the time.
An acceptable fix for games that do this so egregiously would be to simply add a checkpoint between the stages, so even if the player falls during the second stage, they don’t have to start the fight from the very beginning again. That’s part of the process that can truly suck all the enjoyment out of it. After dying to The Dancer’s second stage for the first time, I slumped back, let out a big sigh, and picked up my phone for some doomscrolling instead. I didn’t have the energy to jump straight back into the fight, with the knowledge that I’d have to fight my way through the first stage all over again, because it just felt like a waste of time. I’d done that bit already.
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It also wouldn’t feel anywhere near as insulting if the second phase was initiated when the boss’s health is depleted to the halfway point. Then it’s purely a visual mind trick: the fight would be absolutely no different, but I wouldn’t feel cheated because the enemy hasn’t healed halfway through, while I’m managing the same health bar I started with.
Devs, stop letting bosses heal between phases, and in an ideal world, give us a checkpoint after each stage. There isn’t anything wrong with multi-stage boss fights in theory, but the way they’re usually implemented in the current gaming era makes them less fun and far more annoying.