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[sek]
New member
I've seen a few reviews of MK that make mention of the bosses being difficult, and not always in a positive manner, which made me wonder what everyone's opinions are on what makes a good end boss for a fighting game.
Should they be someone ridiculously hard to beat unless you have top level skills? I mean, it is the end guy/girl/whatever in the game so there should be some difficulty involved. SNK games are infamous for having super tough bosses, but I never thought they were cheap at all, you needed to really bring the skillz to beat the game. Compare that to someone like Seth from SS4 who more or less spams powerful moves, which leaves you to either figure out a pattern to attack or sometimes just get lucky. I personally find bosses like that extremely annoying and counterproductive to getting people to keep playing your game if all they get rewarded with is having to fight a cheap-ass boss.
MK as a series has had a little of both. Shang Tsung in MK1 was different since he didn't fight as himself very much, and when he was morphed into others he really didn't spam any of the moves he was just faster than anyone else. Shao Kahn in MK2/3 seemed like one of the cheap bosses at first, but he still posed a good enough challenge to skilled players. It seemed once the series became console-only things changed into fighting the projectile spamming invulnerable boss where you have to wait and wait for the moment to attack and try not to die in the process.
Perhaps that's the key, once games weren't being designed to get people to keep popping in their quarters the idea of not making the end boss an annoyingly cheap piece of crap faded away. Personally, I like how they handled bosses in MK. I haven't got to the end of the tower yet, but fighting the bosses in arcade mode seemed reasonable in terms of difficulty and challenge. Kintaro actually seems kind of easy, but at least Shao Kahn puts up a good fight.
Should they be someone ridiculously hard to beat unless you have top level skills? I mean, it is the end guy/girl/whatever in the game so there should be some difficulty involved. SNK games are infamous for having super tough bosses, but I never thought they were cheap at all, you needed to really bring the skillz to beat the game. Compare that to someone like Seth from SS4 who more or less spams powerful moves, which leaves you to either figure out a pattern to attack or sometimes just get lucky. I personally find bosses like that extremely annoying and counterproductive to getting people to keep playing your game if all they get rewarded with is having to fight a cheap-ass boss.
MK as a series has had a little of both. Shang Tsung in MK1 was different since he didn't fight as himself very much, and when he was morphed into others he really didn't spam any of the moves he was just faster than anyone else. Shao Kahn in MK2/3 seemed like one of the cheap bosses at first, but he still posed a good enough challenge to skilled players. It seemed once the series became console-only things changed into fighting the projectile spamming invulnerable boss where you have to wait and wait for the moment to attack and try not to die in the process.
Perhaps that's the key, once games weren't being designed to get people to keep popping in their quarters the idea of not making the end boss an annoyingly cheap piece of crap faded away. Personally, I like how they handled bosses in MK. I haven't got to the end of the tower yet, but fighting the bosses in arcade mode seemed reasonable in terms of difficulty and challenge. Kintaro actually seems kind of easy, but at least Shao Kahn puts up a good fight.
