R P G A M E R . C O M   -   E D I T O R I A L S

You're Not The Boss of Me

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Gabriel Ang
FAN EDITORIALIST

For everybody playing RPG's it's the same routine:

1. Enter dungeon
2. Lay waste to enemies
3. Save at the save point that suggests a boss
4. Get your ass kicked by boss
5. Realize proper tactics and kick boss' ass

One way or another all of us has had our share of getting our heads butts to us by some super powerful creature/person/thing that just happened to be at the end of the dungeon; a thing many times stronger than regular enemies, this enemy or group of enemies represent the pinnacle of difficulty in each dungeon. By natural correlation we can say that by defeating this "boss", all enemies in the area tend to lose their will to fight and the dungeon ceases to function in for the antagonists plans.

But think about it for a second. There are times where these enemies are nothing more than pumped up monsters or pumped up people, and are, at times, not even considered a boss in literal terms. By definition, a boss is the entity that makes the decisions or exercises authority. However, there are those instances where you'll have a "boss" monster, but this boss monster/person in little or no ways exercises control or authority.

However, by RPG and gaming definition, a boss would be an enemy that was considerably more powerful than other enemies in the area, was a unique enemy that you would only fight once or in a limited series, and one that would allow plot progression.

So why were they called bosses in the first place?

There are many examples of this. Each game has had a boss that wasn't literally a "boss". Final Fantasy 7 had the Materia Keeper in Mt. Nibelheim which was technically just a large hard monster. Suikoden II had the Fog-like boss in the mountain pass that just suddenly appeared out of nowhere. There, perhaps, are hundreds of others who fall into this category that, sadly, are too many to mention or perhaps even recall.

So why then were these enemies called bosses?

One belief is that the name simply stuck as the term, back in the day where every boss was actually THE boss of the dungeon. Eventually we began having bosses that weren't the bosses by definition, and even at times had no real connection to the plot. However, because they did have the quality of being the toughest enemy and did allow plot progression, the term "boss" stuck and a more-or-less-exclusive definition for a boss was created in the RPG and general gaming lingo.

Another simple possibility was suggested by the RPGamer editorials chief: it was more practical to name it as such. In practical terms, it would be so much easier to call these entities as "bosses" rather than "major enemies" or "main enemies", for lack of better terms. That's the point: maybe there isn't a better term for it. Boss is far more accurate, practical and straight to the point than any other definitions that could be suggested.

And so boss became the term that stuck. We can't really point out the origin of the usage because so many RPG's have come and gone, and the term is more or less the culmination of all these games.

Who knows? Maybe in the near future bosses won't be called bosses anymore. Maybe when we're all old our children will be calling them by different names.