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The past few weeks saw me work my through Final Fantasy V. As most who have played know, it is not the finest of the Final Fantasy name, but a fun game nonetheless. After around thirty hours of game play I found myself at the final boss. I think it was fair for me to be confident. I had a well developed party and had succeeded in breezing through most of the boss battles in the final dungeon. In the least I thought I could expect to have a fighting chance.
I was wrong. Upon challenging Exdeath I was succinctly blasted with a single attack. The six follow up attempts yielded the same results. It seemed that for all the point I had made of finishing every random encounter I ran into throughout the game my party was still too low in level to survive the final boss. I had a good four or five hours of level grinding to look forward to.
Suffice it to say I wasn't happy. Final Fantasy V has since been removed from the GBA slot of my DS and has been replaced by Riviera: The Promised Land.
This is not the first time an unfair boss has halted my progress through a game and I doubt it will be the last. In RPGs, most especially, this is a problem because unlike an action game or shooter you can't simply persevere, learn from your mistakes, and eventually develop the skills to take down a boss. If you aren't strong enough, no matter what style of Role Playing Game you're involved in, a lot of time the only recourse left is to grind levels over and over until you finally have stats high enough to handle whatever the boss might be throwing at you.
This is much easier said than done. As any veteran of the genre can tell you, towards the end of most Role Playing Games level acceleration can take hours. A single level can cost thousands of hard to get experience points and honestly, even the most entertaining game play grows tired after you go through the motions a few hundred times. In some games this process is made even more difficult by the limitations of the game design. In Fire Emblem (GBA) I suffered an even more dire problem. I made it to the final boss but the characters required by the storyline to fight him weren't strong enough to kill him. Again the case seemed unfair, I had been strong enough to take down the rest of my opponents handily, the thought that I couldn't take a single hit from this guy seemed like a cheat.
What made matters truly bad however is the fact that there weren't anymore enemies to build up my stats on. The final map was the last place to gain experience and there simply wasn't enough there to make the difference. I had to start the entire game over just so I could make up for the minor mistake of focusing a little less than necessary on a few characters.
My problem is not with tough bosses. In fact, I love a challenging boss fight. One of my favorite RPG experiences was the battle with Zeromus at the end of Final Fantasy IV. It was truly an edge of your seat affair. Every round was a nail biter and to the very finish I wasn't sure if I was actually going to beat the thing. That is a good boss battle and I didn't have to grind out a half dozen levels to beat it. I went in with what I had and after a few losses was able to concoct a strategy that allowed me to take my opponent down.
I don't see why a game should be any other way. Placing an unfair boss at the end of a game just increases the chance that people aren't going to have the will to finish it, especially in today's world where one could just as easily look up the ending on Youtube and be done with it. I don't play forty hours of video game to be told I need to mindlessly play another five hours to see the end.
Conversely however game designers should be careful to make sure end bosses aren't too easy. Tapping into the Final Fantasy series again, let it be known that I love Final Fantasy VIII. Blemishes aside I think it's a great game, but the end boss disappointed me. I had spent a great deal of time preparing for the fight and when I got to it, all it took was a few Limit Breaks and it was over. As I said, I was prepared for the fight, but that doesn't mean it should have been the pushover that it was. Some balance should be established where the final boss won't be cruelly difficult but also hard enough to merit a player's time.
So what conclusion have I been trying to bring myself to? Not quite sure really. Chances are this has amounted to little more than the frustrated ranting of some guy given a public outlet to vent on, but I think some coherent point can be distinguished. Gaming has come to the point where we developers should have enough sophistication to not make these kinds of mistakes anymore. It shouldn't be a case anymore of too hard, too easy and no in between and I only hope that as more new releases come out I will see the balanced, fair and still challenging game play that should define the medium by now.
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