Bossed Around

I can not stress enough, if you have not finished Mass Effect 2 and intend to, then go no further. This article is not for you -- at least not yet -- because I intend to spend time exploring its most tender and uncensored secrets, probing with a total disregard for the sanctity of any of the game’s normally unmentionable parts. In terms of spoilers, this article is "gone wild" like an illicit spring break video or a David Duchovny diary entry.

As usual, reviews be damned. You want my review of Mass Effect 2? Here it is – the game is really good, just like everyone else on the planet has already confirmed. The specifics that make such a statement true – or at least objectively defensible – are, frankly, pretty boring and certainly a lot less interesting than the game itself. The time for reviews is over. The time for analysis is at hand.

Beware, I’m giving the end of the game away in 3.
2.
1.

Like BioShock before it, Mass Effect 2’s greatest sin is in the final boss battle with the human reaper, a ridiculous Terminator-shaped space ship that is, frankly, made all the less imposing when you consider that I killed it by shooting it in the eye with a pistol.

Dear galaxy,

The greatest threat you face is not an ancient evil. The greatest threats are bans on handguns. Repeal any curbs on the Second Amendment in your sector and consider yourself now safe from Reapers. You’re welcome. Love, Cmdr. Shepherd.

How I longed for the game to have ended after the monumental and crucial decision over what to do with this supposedly hyper-advanced technology. Here at last was a game whose climactic element is a decision with ramifications that may not play out fully for years to come. Daring and inventive, this was maturity and restraint on a grand, galactic level.

Then the big Reaper thingy lunges up from out of nowhere, like the bad guy at the end of a bad horror movie, and shoots some laser beams at you for a little while. How I wish it had all stopped while this construct still maintained a vestige of mystery about it – when I could still suspend my disbelief that I hadn’t worked all this time to fight an overdeveloped Sinistar that could be felled by a particularly well organized drive by. Whether this constitutes good or bad game-making is a point worth some debate, but without question, it’s terrible storytelling.

File Mass Effect 2 into the unfortunate folder of evidence that supports the thesis: Game companies should consider getting rid of boss battles from adult games.

Is that too audacious a statement to make? Can we not begin to imagine that, perhaps, we have confused a story's climax with an arbitrary conflict with a difficult “boss”? Can we entertain the notion that this conflation is a fundamental flaw that deserves to be aggressively re-examined? Would we feel that something had been lost from our games if we looked for new ways to end epic games?

I struggle to remember a boss battle that I genuinely enjoyed. Maybe fighting the titular evil at the end of Diablo 2; because let’s be honest, it just makes sense to have that fight. But even as I consider it, I have to admit that it wasn’t so much the battle that was fun, but the story of that confrontation. Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, was primed to have a satisfying ending built on the foundation of difficult moral dilemmas and gray-area choices – do you give technology to the Illusive Man that he might someday use to dominate other races?

I am not the best person to discuss comparative examples of good and bad boss battles. I rarely get to the really big ones in most games, and when I do I’m either disappointed at how trivial the ordeal was or frustrated that I didn’t get it on the first try. It seems like one of those conceits in gaming that is nearly impossible to pull off, where the window between accessibility and challenge is so narrow that 9 games out of 10 won’t even come close.

To make a boss really work, he needs to be present throughout the game. He needs to seem initially invincible, but increasingly evenly matched as you progress. There must be a sense of confrontation fostered within the protagonist, so that when you arrive to finally lay waste to your enemy, it makes sense. And, even then, it’s maybe 50/50 at best that most game makers will stick the landing and give players both a sense of accomplishment and closure.

There has to be a better way.

Is it so wrong to imagine that just resolving the story, or challenging the player with a tough choice, is not enough? As game-makers develop their story-making chops, why not have them dare to rely on their skills as storytellers? Is there room for a place where "climax" is not synonymous with "epic battle"?

I am very happy to have played Mass Effect 2. As I pointed out at the start, I am convinced that this was an outstanding game. Like “unobtanium” in Avatar, the Reaper episode will just be something I try to forget. It serves as a reminder, however, of how far we still can go in finding new ways to tell stories in games.

Comments

Spoiler:

I rather liked it, myself. It helped show that your character actually personally did something during the suicide mission aside from shooting a bunch of Collectors (and possibly dying). Plus that thing's expression was sort of creepy.

What I didn't like was how the only reason you could give for wanting to destroy the facility was because it was an "abomination" or because you didn't want Cerberus to have it. I mean, sure, it's an Eldritch Abomination at its finest, but what about the practical concerns, like that one derelict Reaper that brainwashed all the scientists on it? What about the Reaper and/or Collector viruses? Destroying it seems like the safest thing to do no matter who would otherwise get it.

I've got another good example of the "every game must have boss battles" mentality hurting a game: Guitar Hero III.

Elysium wrote:

Again I want to stress that the idea is not that boss battles never have a place, but that there is genuine folly in assuming they are, by default, a necessity.

I will add that the final boss of New Super Mario Bros. Wii was one of the most awesomely epic things I've seen in any game ever.

Vargen wrote:

I've got another good example of the "every game must have boss battles" mentality hurting a game: Guitar Hero III.

+1

If there's one thing a rhythm game does not need, it's an element of randomized hostility. On the higher difficulties, the only way I was able to beat Lucifer was to replay over and over until he got nothing but sucky powerups and I got nothing but sweet ones. It was a totally bizarre experience, given the genre context.

There is a similar article that was in the May 2008 (188) issue of Edge Magazine called "Big Unfriendly Giants" (pages 78-83) that discusses this same idea.

I couldn't find an online version on their site though.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I agree that the ending of Mass Effect 2 would have been much better if it ended where you suggested.

I think that Mass Effect 2 had some good "boss fights" though. These fights involved large creatures like the Reaper Maw and some of the ships, like the small ship you fight at the end of the Archangel quest and I think the quest for the assassin. Those larger than normal enemies had a lead up and could be dealt with in a similar manner to the other enemies in the game.

The one scene I'm thinking of specifically is one where you cross a bridge and all of a sudden there is a large helicopter like ship firing rockets at you. I died the first time and the second time I had my nuke gun ready, charged it up, and took the thing down in a single blast. I could have gone about it in a more traditional way, but I'd been saving up ammo for that thing, which needs to hit 100% before you can fire and this was my first chance to use it. It was a big moment that made sense in the story and gave you the chance to use your big guns.

A similar event was the battle with the machine when recruiting Tali. There is a nice buildup to that fight, you are given many ways to approach it, including moral / strategy choices and it fits with the story.

While I agree that the unfinished terminator was underwhelming, I was ok with it overall. Also, I think it is possible to have the final epic battle in a mature game as long as it fits with the design of the game. Example: Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn had one of the best, fully fleshed out villains ever to appear in a game. His presence is constantly felt throughout the game, and the final confrontation with him is very satisfying. The expansion, Throne of Bhaal was also what I would consider a mature (ok mature enough) RPG that would be pointless without the final battle. Consider: the entire game is spent accumulating Bhaalspawn essence into a few (and then eventually two -

Spoiler:

you and Melissaan

) offspring until the final Highlander-esque battle. You could argue the whole series builds up to that final battle, and quite frankly I don't think the series could have ended any other way.

Finally, one name: Arthas. The writing for that was well-constructed, admittedly campy but not enough to be embarrasing to adult players, but nonetheless required a boss-fight for closure after the buildup over the entire expansion and Warcraft III plus the Frozen Throne expansion.

In short, boss fights are fine as long as they are properly handled and are considered an suitable option, a tool for appropriate closure, but not a necessity.

Yeah, the boss fight at the end of Bioshock completely ruined the game for me. All the good stuff that I experienced through the game was just wiped out by that few minutes of schlock.

The big dumb fight at the end of Mass Effect 2 almost ruined it for me, but I think this game was saved precisely because there was a moral climax just before the big dumb fight. For me, it ended up being sort of a high-energy denouement, and it let me blow off some steam after all the tension leading up to the climax.

Still, it was a big dumb fight. Worse, it overshadowed the scene that came immediately after it, where it was made clear that the "Collector General" was actually just an avatar for the reaper Harbinger.

All the other "boss" type fights in the game seemed to fit much better. I agree that the original Mass Effect end fight with Saren and zombie Saren was handled much better. I normally don't like boss fights much. I think that the better boss fights Bioware has pulled off show that you can still have boss fights, but they really shouldn't be these overblown affairs with lumbering idiot monsters.

Despite my intense love for Mass Effect 2, I have to agree that the boss fight at the end felt out of place. The decisions I made and the repercussions of those decisions were the most exciting moments of the final mission. I had a real sense of accomplishment that the care I took exploring, upgrading, and gaining loyalty had real story and character implications. I assumed throughout the game that all the missions were just busy work that increased the size and power of my arsenal, but in reality these missions had real implications for the ending story arc. Still, despite the crappy boss fight, the ending was tense, exciting, and felt very unique. It is easy for me to just ignore the giant terminator I had to take down. It simply felt incidental to all the other stuff that was going on in the game and in my head at the time.

I found the scanning to be far more of a jolt than the boss fight. Taking me out of the story and action to attend to a boring task one of the crew should have been doing seemed arbitrary and overly time consuming. If anything in the game sticks in my head as a kick in the nuts it was the resource scanning. Damn boring and completely unrelated to the character and story. At least the terminator was integrated into the story (too bad it cheapened it) and it was over quickly. It was a small blip in finely crafted game. Scanning, on the other hand, was a blemish I still dread in my subsequent playthroughs.

Scanning, while incredibly boring for the most part, did fit with the story / world / gameplay. It was a way to explore galaxies and find little missions, some of which had decent impact on the world. I didn't read many of the descriptions, but this part of the game, like the codex entries, were there for people who wanted to learn more about the world of Mass Effect.

I think it could have been better, but I do think it fit.

You don't need to actually scan to get the codex and "anomaly detected" message. I would have preferred they leave it as is, except no actual scanning, just a button press and the resources are yours. They could then add more loot to side missions and provide the player enough resources to get their available upgrades.

I see no compelling reason to keep it. If it was short and simple like hacking and bypassing, then it would have been fine. Maybe a quick simple minigame where you have to optimize probe placement for maximum resource capture or something. I honestly see no story, character, or gameplay reason to keep it in. It puts the brakes on the flow of the game big time. I like breaks in the pacing and variety in my games, but it just was not fun. It felt like a task, not a game.

I'm going to cheat a little bit and basically rehash my opinion from 2 months ago, where I basically complained that boss fights are more often than not one-off gimmicks instead of integral parts of the game. Sure, I appreciate encountering interesting enemies, but boss enemies aren't inherently interesting or memorable just because they require the player to win using unorthodox tactics. If the player ends up using different techniques to defeat the boss, ones that don't work elsewhere and which the player probably hasn't practiced, then it's just "gotcha" gameplay.

As a curious aside, the first Halo game didn't have any bosses. Instead, it relied on set-piece battles, which I consider to be a more interesting technique for adding challenge. Certainly it makes sense for a combat-themed narrative to have some climactic final battle, but I would almost rather watch a cutscene than go through the tedious exercise of exploiting some perfunctory weak point 3 times.

Y'know another thing that was kind of missing from the end scene of Mass Effect 2 was the way you set the detonator for 10 minutes, activate it.. and then have a lengthy battle scene with no countdown.

Would have added nicely to the 'suicide mission' aspect as well as another alternate ending.

I suppose there are lots of ways of second guessing the ending scene, but my current favourite alternate ending would have your entire team showing up just as you insert the disk into the control column. Then you end up with 10 minutes of frantic running and fighting as you try to escape, with the reaper popping up in unexpected and terrifying ways.

Pawz wrote:

Y'know another thing that was kind of missing from the end scene of Mass Effect 2 was the way you set the detonator for 10 minutes, activate it.. and then have a lengthy battle scene with no countdown.

Would have added nicely to the 'suicide mission' aspect as well as another alternate ending.

I suppose there are lots of ways of second guessing the ending scene, but my current favourite alternate ending would have your entire team showing up just as you insert the disk into the control column. Then you end up with 10 minutes of frantic running and fighting as you try to escape, with the reaper popping up in unexpected and terrifying ways.

That would have been much better, although I still think it would be more effective still if the Collector General was the end boss in that case. The Termi-reaper just came out of nowhere, with no buildup. Running away from the bomb with the Collector General harassing you would have been very tense.

Thinking about it, there was a tiny bit of build up to something, but bioware never 'sealed the deal' satisfactorily with the terminator. You're told human colonies are being harvested and people never seen again, in the endgame you see them dissolved and fed into the reaper. So from that you've got a big threat to humanity, and a big enemy in the collectors who we are told and later confirmed are working for the reapers, and then the big master-plan is to make a large evil statue of a human with no exposition of the bad guy's logic behind it. I'm pretty sure it would have made an equal amount of sense (although not really fitting for sci-fi) if the final boss was a collection of man-crates made from the abducted.

The reapers sometimes build fleets of other reapers out of the corpses of those they harvest during their invasion. If they were harvesting millions of humans, or even hundreds of thousands as was suggested by the dialog, I would have expected the human reaper to be at least as large as the Sovereign reaper.

I could see an ending where you see a giant human shaped all black reaper, set the factory to detonate (without shooting at the glowing tanks) and have to escape during a final middle sized battle. The actual human reaper is OK, it's just the size of it in the game and the fight that is a bit silly.

I don't think there is much of a way to personally fight the collector general since I don't think he does much besides type on a keyboard and mind control army collectors.

Some horrific looking hellish creature covered in screaming heads and glowing hardware would have been cool. Something that looked like an abomination from the Ninth Level of cyborg hell and not Arnold Schwarzenegger without his skin.

That boss was dumb, and easy. The damn thing never so much as scratched me on the veteran difficulty.

To make a boss really work, he needs to be present throughout the game. He needs to seem initially invincible, but increasingly evenly matched as you progress. There must be a sense of confrontation fostered within the protagonist, so that when you arrive to finally lay waste to your enemy, it makes sense.

Chrono Trigger. Still the most perfectly-formed RPG.