Are First Bosses Bad On Purpose?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
- Take a shot everytime I say boss.
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Pepper man from pizza tower was an amazing first boss. He didn't hold back at all and really felt like a great introduction for what's to come.
And what’s great about him is he as much personality as other characters
While each boss may have to one-up the previous boss, the first boss has the important role of being the player's first impression of bosses. It's the first major foe: make a good impression!
Whispy, in some games, does this by using what I call the "phase two twist", a formula that some Kirby bosses, especially returning ones, like to use. Phase 1 is fairly uneventful and standard, but this is all changed by some wacky, memorable twist in Phase 2. I'm sure you can name a few. "The tree is using the background!" "It's the return of 64's radial arenas!" "Dedede's belly has a MOUTH"
Another way is to make the first boss look huge and intimidating, but not necessary make it too difficult. Think False Knight from Hollow Knight, or even Gorimondo, usurping Whispy's position as first boss in Kirby and the Forgotten Land.
While Mario isn't known for it's canon, Larry Koopa actually has a canonical explanation for his boss fights being the most basic, regardless of his placement in the game's boss order.
In the Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga remake, he implies he's kinda lazy and doesn't really try too hard. He says this when he decides to let Captain Goomba lead the charge instead of taking it on himself just because he's his higher up. If he can get away with others doing the work, he will.
Though, I think his reputation and the canon explanation for it is what makes stuff like his Color Splash fight stand out as his best one, since that one despite actually displaying some challenge still plays on his character by having him order minions to fill the train's smoke pipe with HP Up Hearts to heal him. And when a Toad tries to stop the minions, he just orders more minions to deal with it. It's still in character because it's the minions putting in 90% of the work while he stands on the smoke pipe.
The Koopalings are such cool characters and it’s unfair that they only get to be in the otherwise „generic“ games.
Golden Owl's channel talks about how Onix is a great first boss battle in Pokémon.
Onix has a ton of Defense and is a Rock-type, so the Normal-type moves that did good damage on most other Pokémon who weren't strong against Normal moves and didn't have such high Defense do hardly any damage against Onix.
It forces you to use other moves (specifically Grass or Water which do 4 times more damage than usual) against Rock/Ground type Pokémon and both attack Onix's very weak Special Defense stat instead of its massive Defense stat.
But to give you time to try different things, Onix's Attack stats are very, very weak. So you're facing an intimating Pokémon, but it hits as hard as most other Pokémon you've fought up to this point.
If you you picked Charmander, you can do more damage with your Special Fire moves than your Physical Normal moves. And if you can get a burn on Onix, you'll be able to stave off its already weak attacks.
Basically, Onix is the biggest Pokémon you've faced to this point, and it offers a big challenge but only if you fail the test of Roshambo/Rock-paper-scissors and refuse to learn your types.
So it is, effectively, a tutorial in a boss fight. Learn the mechanics of the game, or die very slowly but surely.
Honestly for me, Colgera from ToTK was a great first boss since that was the one I went to first, as the game was guiding me there, I understand fans riffing on the bosses in this game for being relatively easy, but the sheer spectacle of it all sucked me in as someone who willingly immerses myself into being the character. What really helped it stick in my mind was something I myself did when fighting the boss, specifically what I did at one point was a dive attack on the boss, the way I went from floating delicately in the air to crashing straight through one of its weak points really helped with the whole spectacle
huh, I never really thought about the importance of these things but yea now I see how well a first boss can be done, its a nice perspective to look at
This might've been the worst aspect of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The boss fights, maybe with the exception of the final boss, which was decent, were obviously an afterthought compared to the rest of the experience. Pre-BotW 3D Zelda bosses, on the other hand, are some of the greatest ever made, because many of them utilize your tools in creative ways and are a spectacle. These are some of my favorite boss fights in games. Bosses that manage to be interesting and fun, that's how it's done, whether it's a platformer or an RPG, they can really improve the whole experience.
The first boss in every mainline Kirby game
Dream Land: Whispy Woods
Adventure: Whispy Woods
Dream Land 2: Whispy Woods avoiding coronavirus
Super Star: Whispy Woods/Dynablade/Fatty Whale
Dream Land 3: Whispy Woods
64: Whispy Woods
Amazing Mirror: King Golem (Stone Whispy)
Squeak Squad: King Dedede
Return to Dream Land: Whispy Woods
Triple Deluxe: Flowery Woods
Planet Robobot: Gigavolt
Star Allies: Whispy Woods
Kirby forgor this land: Gorimondo
Results:
Whispy Woods: 8
King Golem: 1
Dynablade: 1
King Dedede: 1
Gigavolt: 1
Fatty Whale: 1
Flowery Woods: 1
Gorimondo: 1
And there you have it
Probably my favorite first boss was indeed whispy in Robobot. This is one of the most bombastic and hype boss battles I've ever seen, this is one of the best examples in gaming i've seen of giving an amazing first impression
One amazing first boss i can think of the top of my head would be the Minotaur in SMT4. It teaches you pretty much the basics for the entire duration of the game that buffs, debuffs and hitting weaknesses are essential to progress in the game.
Something that was definitely interesting was the first boss of Sonic Mania being the Death Egg Robot when it's usually the final boss in a lot of the classic titles.
Personally, I find first levels more boring.
Like green hill zone for example.
Makes you feel kinda cozy but that's the problem. There's nothing special going on.
I think that people tend to design first bosses by having a boss concept and then purposefully watering them down for the sake of keeping the difficulty in check. Or they just shove it in as some unmemorable encounter.
A good first boss circumvents that exact problem by for example setting a proper difficulty standard without complex mechanics, making them unique and memorable, or by giving them extra attention and proper treatment.
He’s being converted into a fan
Him playing Forces was not supposed to happen in this timeline, but it’s been corrected :)
a good example of good first boss in my opinion is the eye of cthulhu from terraria, it's not really the first one but more often than not the one you'll come across first since you can find his summon in chest and he can spawn randomly if he wasn't defeated before, he's big, slow and imposing BUT if you lower his hp enough he will start dashing around and doing much more contact damage, making the fight more interesting, and if you are on higher difficulty he will start dashing A LOT and the lower he is the more he dashes, until he does nothing but dashing which makes the fight very tense until you finnaly take him down and feel relived, a fun boss that explains well how the other boss fights will go without being too hard nor too easy
The fact that a tree is the first boss in Kirby and the final boss is an Eldritch horror. that even final fantasy bosses can be jealous of is amazing
Sonic Frontiers' First Boss, Giganto is amazing.
The first time I fought against him I popped off so god damn hard (mainly because of Undefeatable playing in the BG lol)
I haven't seen you in a long time. Welcome back, amigo!
Amadeus Wolfgeist from Luigi's Mansion 3(Yes I know he's not technically the first boss, however he is the first main boss of the 1st area) I love how he's fight bulids up from throwing chairs, to sending in enemies to then possess his Piano that's basically a better version of the staircase from 2. He's also the only boss that throws projectiles behind him when attempting to capture him as well as being one of the few bosses that actually somewhat difficult to capture
Another good one is Rabbid Kong from Mario + Rabbids Kingdom battle where the boss well create a shockwave that pushes you back unless you hide behind the covers, with each phase having more cover destroyed.
I was hoping you mentioned Ghirahim from Zelda Skyward Sword. Not only was he is creepy, the first time he is almost surely going to rob you of the sword. That is really memorable.
Bruh the boss tries to teach you the fundamental basics of the game, like Sonic Adventure
I lost count of how many shots I took...
Regardless, a retrospective of this: I will say, I do see the presentation of the first boss. When I think more about this, I notice a few things: When I fought Gohma for the first time in LoZ: Windwaker (HD), I was stuck and had no idea what to do. Once I looked up how to defeat it, when I progressed through the rest of the game and encountered the remaining bosses, I had confidence and knew what to do; the concept of the bosses was consistent (until the final battle, which was an exception). While I have never played Sonic Frontiers, how the first boss is designed and how you described it made me realize that bosses are going to be treated differently in different games, and the first boss is usually going to set a standard for what to expect going forward. While I do not know the conditions required to fight a boss in Sonic Frontiers, I can imagine there must be some buildup for each boss, from what you described and show. I then took a look at gameplay for both Giganto and Wyvern. GIgant set a standard for me on what the player would do and how Sonic would fight the boss, but when I saw Wyvern's fight, I was still surprized on how it was executed. While core mechanics remained the same, the approach to the Wyvern is completely different from Giganto, which I am impressed, and now naturally expect Knight and Supreme to have their unique twists as well. It's that confirmation bias I probably have that makes me look forward to fighting the second boss of a game.
When comparing the Koopalings to Whispy Woods, I can understand the community's exaust from the Koopalings (and Boomboom) as they kind of serves as an omen to obstruct unique bosses to appear later in the game, like bosses players would encounter in Super Mario Galaxy/2/Odyssey, Super Mario Bros. DS, or Mario RPGs before the 2010s (exception; Dream Team). Whispy Woods doesn't apply that rule in the kirby games. While Whispy fights are basically tradition, it does not send the same message to players as koopalings send.
I wonder if channel Kirby knows about the thousand year door remake or remaster and would channel Kirby play it for the channel!!
Yellow Brock : 🧍♂️
I don’t think all first bosses are bad.
Hall laborotory is making a new kirby
Yeah they- they tend to do that
Nowadays, mainline kirby games are released in roughly 2-year-long cycles, with the exception of FL taking 4 years so that both it RTDX could be released at once. Since FL released in 2022, it could be plausible that there is a new Kirby game this year, but if we don't hear anything about a mainline Kirby title by March, I wouldn't get my hopes up for a mainline Kirby title this year, since they typically (though not always) release in Spring.
@@Hamantha You're telling me a shrimp fried this rice?
@@angrysunflower222 I appreciate you for that 😁🫶
The first bosses are better than the final
Yes
Mega Video!