Balancing the Final Boss Scale

by Cloud Slash

Ohhhhh, final bosses. The very last enemies we face in a game, final bosses are whether they are lothable madmen that you've spent 50 hours playing through the game hoping to fight, or random monsters that seem to have no real place in the story, they are still a vital part of the gameplay aspect of any game. However, in the case of RPGs I've noticed what I consider to be a serious problem regarding them: often, a final boss's difficulty is extremly unbalanced compared to the relative difficulty of the rest of the game.

Case in point: FFX. (And for the record I'm referring to Jecht, NOT Yu Yevon) For all of the "hardcore" rpgers out there (hardcore for the sake of this article, means anyone who power-levels and goes out of their way to get uber-summons regardless of whether they started playing rpgs with an NES or Xbox or anythng else), this guy was a breeze because you could kill him in in 3 hits:
1. Anima hits him to revert him to his second form.
2. Anima hits him again.
3. Jecht hits the floor defeated.

And thus, the "hardcore" rpgers out there constantly complain about how "easy" Jecht was. But what about those of us who aren't alegedly "hardcore," those of us who don't power level, who don't spend unnecessary hours getting the ridiculously powerful summon that can kill the final boss before it is halfway finished (read: Anima)? Well, in my case, Jecht pulverized me. Well, at first I thought it was sorta ok, because I generally don't mind final bosses being a bit more difficult than everything else you've been forced to face so far.

However, believe it or not, Jecht is way beyond that level of difficulty. I say that with authority: I played through all of FFX, running away as little as possible, losing one or two random battles, and dying about 5 or so times at Seymour Flux, and once or twice at Yunalesca, but overall, it took me about 3 weeks to get from Tidus' name screen to the last save point and I played the game at a fairly steady pace. Then it took me 3 more weeks just to defeat Jecht. Not 3 hits, 3 friggin weeks. That's ridiculous.

And sadly, this is hardly the only game I've had this problem with. Lunar 2, Grandia, the GBC remake of Dragon Warrior 3, and most notably, Xenosaga and it's predecessor Xenogears (which currently holds the record of longest stuck period in a game without me selling it at 2 MONTHS) are all guity of this.

People, I hate to break this to you, but the final bosses, whether we like it or not, need to be balanced enough in difficulty so that they can present a good challenge, but still be defeated without resorting to purely optional things like marathon leveling or going on a side quest to get the uber summon. For those of you who think this doesn't sound like fun consider this: Grandia II was a strongly story driven rpg that had virtually no sidequests and the one or two that might qualify don't give you considerably better levels, spells, or items. Now if the game designers had decided to make Valmar as disproportionately difficult as Jecht was in my case instead of mildly challenging at best, the only way to stand a chance would be to stop the game and the story for about 7-8 hours while the party leveled up. And then everyone would be complaining that Valmar was the most difficult final boss ever. Yet there are many of us out here that play most games in this fashion; I for one, avoid sidequests as much as possible until AFTER I beat the game. And really, when you get down to it, the difficulty of the final boss doesn't matter one bit if you have some uber-summon that can kill it in one turn or level way beyond what you'd get if you played the game normally. So why not balance the difficulty of final bosses? You can always challenge Omega Weapon if you want a "real" challenge.