Top 10 Lists: The Top 10 Most Anticlimactic Final Boss Battles (SPOILERS)

As a long-time gamer, one of the tropes in our particular subset of media which has always held a certain allure for me is the notion of the Final Boss Battle. Given the enduring prevalence of the concept, I can only assume that I'm not the only one enamoured with the it; after all, who wouldn't be? Whether you've invested seven hours in a game or seventy, the appeal of finally standing toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye with your antagonist and beating them to a pulp is intoxicating, and when a game gets it right, the results can potentially be unforgettable. When a great game - or even a mediocre game - is capped with a confrontation that encapsulates everything it does right, both in terms of gameplay and storytelling, one puts the game away on a positive note, feeling satisfied and fulfilled. Unfortunately though, sometimes games - even otherwise great games - don't hit that note. Indeed, sometimes they can hit so far off the mark that it can soil one's entire perception of the game as an experience, leaving a bitter taste in one's mouth after it's done. This can happen for any number of reasons; maybe the final battle is disproportionately easy compared to what's come before; maybe it doesn't make use of the best aspects of the title's gameplay; maybe it just doesn't feel appropriately climactic, not reaching those all-important heady heights of scale that a game's narrative demands. Whatever the reason, this is a list of ten of gaming history's most egregious offenders. (A couple of notes: this list does not include battles where the factor which makes the fight anticlimactic is non-compulsory - e.g. an RPG where the party has been power levelling to beat an optional superboss, rendering the ordinary final boss a cakewalk - or battles which are staged purely for the benefit of story, and therefore retain their dramatic potency in spite of technical issues (e.g. Metal Gear Solid 4) or the absence of challenge (e.g. Final Fantasy VII)) Let the listing begin!

The reason this infamously odd final boss doesn't rank higher on the list is that, in spite of every sin it commits on the level of storytelling, as far as aesthetics go, the battle is actually pretty well staged. Your party is floating in an ethereal collosseum, surrounded by the cries of the dying damned, squaring off against a giant blue angel/demon/obelisk thing seeking the utter annihilation of all creation and boasting attacks OTT enough to make a Dragonball Z fan blush. A pretty cool confrontation in its own right, but that's rendered moot by the fact that to this day, NO-ONE has the first idea of where Necron came from. Most of the plot developments in Final Fantasy IX's final disc came out of left field (a portal to a dimension spontaneously created from the universe's residual memories? WTF?), but this guy was the cherry on top. After the battle with main baddie Kuja, Necron popped up out of nowhere with no warning and for no adequately explained reason, and better yet, after he was beaten, he was never even spoken of again. Within the larger context of the story, the fight may as well not have happened, and in a game which represents a 40+ hour time investment for players, having a final boss that amounts to a Big Lipped Alligator Moment is a bit of a turn off.

Now don't misunderstand me. I love the Metal Gear Solid saga, even its controversial second entry, and yes, even its mind-warping ending. Sure, it squeezes in so many implausible plot twists into the course of one (very, very long) cut scene that the story descends into outright silliness around the time the possessed arm transplant comes into play. However, if one reads between the lines there lurks a layer of postmodern satire that toys with the relationship between player and character in addition to probing the series' themes of social control and the formation of the identity more deeply than any of the series' other installments have dared to venture. It was an intelligent, inventive, albeit confusing way of seeing the game off which was unfortunately marred by an awkward, by-the-numbers final boss. Granted, the fight between Raiden and Solidus has a measure of dramatic weight to it, but it feels jammed in and contrived, and worse, has to be conducted with the HF Blade. The weapon is unduly fiddly, sacrificing functionality for an adolescent vision of "cool". In the climax of a game which messes with the player on so many levels, it's disappointing to encounter a final boss that seems to be wedged in for no purpose beyond there being a final boss at all.

Assassin's Creed was originally pitched to be a game about care, skill and subtlety. It was supposed to be about planning your assassinations, getting a feel for the environment, blending in with the crowd, making your way to the target and dispatching them as quickly, quietly and cleanly as possible. For the most part, that's what it delivered, and the missions that punctuate the first 85% of the game's length were alternately exercises in tension and exhiliration. What a pity then, that in the finale Ubisoft decided to throw the whole "subtlety" side of the equation out the window, instead deciding to make Altair a one-man-army and have him face down what could very nearly be called an actual army. It's at this point that the player exasperatedly realises that EVERY SINGLE FIGHT in the entire game follows the same pattern; be surrounded, wait for one enemy to come forward, kill him with the counterattack and repeat. The final boss, Altair's traitorous master Al Mualim, is defeated by the exact same mechanism as an uppity rooftop guard, and when the player discovers this, no amount of crackling philosophical byplay between the master and the apprentice can salvage what is essentially a drawn-out re-enactment of EVERY FIGHT in the game thus far.

Good riddance to this one is what I say. It's really only fitting that a bad game should have a bad finale, but that doesn't make it any less underwhelming for it. One of the biggest issues with the new Prince of Persia is that because its open-ended structure allows for its objectives to be accomplished in any order, the pacing is resultantly flat as a pancake. The narrative lacks any sort of form; indeed, you might even say there is no narrative. The characters are in the same situation at the beginning of the game as they are when the dark lord Ahriman is resurrected in spite of the leads' best efforts due to some arbitrary justification or other amongst the regurgitated high-fantasy mumblings the game passes off as a plot, bringing the story not so much to a climax as an abrupt and welcome full stop. The final conflict takes place in a circular cavern and requires you to shimmy around the walls on a network of vines to reach points of pure light that dispel the festering corruption spread by the dark lord. That's right; you don't combat your antagonist directly, or even see him clearly as the whole thing is done from Ahriman's first-person perspective, so lay aside those thoughts of an epic, stage-by-stage God of War-esque tiny-man-versus-giant-monster battle. There isn't even a sense of urgency to the proceedings: as with the rest of the game, you can't die, each would-be fatal situation only setting you back to the last safe platform, and in spite of sidekick Elika's frantic wails about the supposedly omnicidal Ahriman, there is no time impetus. Prince of Persia has accomplished something quite remarkable with its final boss; it's managed to make fighting a gigantic, world-eating god tedious.

So it turns out that the final surprise of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was the sudden death of the main villain, Gabriel Roman, and the usurption of his position by his lieutenant, Navarro. Eh, it was a fairly limp twist, but at least it set the game up for a dramatic final confrontation with the intrepid hero Drake, right? Well... not really. Unlike several of the other examples on this list which place because they're much too easy, Uncharted insted merits mention because its final boss encounter is like trying to chew through a brick wall. The encounter sees Drake shooting through waves of lackeys as he chases Navarro from one end of a cargo ship to the other. This procedure is complicated somewhat by Navarro's possession of a bizarre weapon which I can only refer to as a SNIPER SHOTGUN. One hit from this doozy is enough to kill Drake outright, and it's invariably perfectly accurate, so the whole fight involves the player trying to get shots off from cover during the brief reload time between Navarro's bullets. There is no margin for error, and the confrontation climaxes in a sequence which follows such a precisely mandated rhythm that trial-and-error is the only possible way to get through it. You'll likely die at least a dozen times in the final segment alone. The frustration of this fight is compounded by the fact that thus far, Uncharted has been quite a lenient game, not allowing the player to stay stuck for too long, nor penalising them too harshly for mistakes. This allowed the gameplay to be conducted with the same sort of action-movie bravura that's so pervasive in the script. In making the final confrontation so contrastingly unforgiving, Drake's Fortune kills the illusion of starring in your own action movie stone dead.

I was actually tempted to strike this entry from the list, on the basis that it seemed to qualify as a confrontation that worked in terms of story despite the absence of a significant challenge. Then I changed my mind, because, despite The Darkness' admittably effective conclusion to its dark and bloody comic-book tragedy, it was mostly non-interactive when it could and should have been, lessening the dramatic effectiveness in a tremendously ill-advised manner. The Darkness' final act sees one-man-army Jackie Estacado charge alone into his Uncle Paulie's lighthouse mansion through waves of henchmen, the Darkness inside him jeering and goading him on the whole time. And to begin with, it's awesome. It's like a John Woo movie, only with more demonic tentacles and minigun-wielding imps. But once you actually get inside the mansion, control is wrested from the player, and Jackie slaughters the remainder of the henchman with what seem to be near-godlike powers. Control is restored after several minutes, and only Uncle Paulie is left. You chase him to the top of the lighthouse, a fat old man with a 9mm pistol trying to fend off a Lovecraftian god. We're finally led to a scene inside the lighthouse where a wounded and powerless Paulie is crawling away from Jackie, pleading for his life, but the player being left with no choice but to shoot him. Thus, the ending of the game is left oddly devoid of challenge, conducted as it is mostly through a series of cutscenes. You could argue that the game accomplished something here. One of the central conceits of the story is Jackie gradually, willingly surrendering control of his body and soul to the Darkness in him, and the removal of interactivity emphasises the point. I would counter however, that what makes the Darkness one of the best modern examples of interactive storytelling is the fact that it is, much like Half-Life, always interactive even in moments of powerlessness. What gives makes some of the game's best moments so poignant (Jenny's death in chapter 1) and potent (the pant-crappingly terrifying torture sequence in chapter 3) is that even while Jackie is restrained, unable to move, we're still there in his head with him, still able to move the camera. His powerlessness is ours. In this final scene however, Jackie rather finds himself empowered and the player rendered powerless, railing against the slaughter even as we see it through Jackie's eyes, creating a dissonance between player and character that isn't present at any other point throughout the game. To my mind, this begs the question; would this not be a much more subtle sequence if WE were being corrupted by the Darkness, experiencing the temptation of evil alongside Jackie? As it stands, The Darkness betrays what makes it otherwise great in its finale, denying the logical conclusion of its own storytelling mechanisms. While finally capping Uncle Paulie is a great moment, it would have been all the greater had the game allowed us to feel that we had been led to it, rather than dragged along by Jackie's coattails.

Ah, Fahrenheit, or Indigo Prophecy as it's known to our North American cousins. The game I love as much for its first half as I loathe it for its second. After introducing us to a mode of videogame storytelling that was possibly the most unique and innovative in years, thanks to a hurried schedule and interference from publishers, it proceeded to take all it had created and throw it out the window of a speeding train. Following a series of plot twists that make MGS2's possessed arm gambit look perfectly rational, hero Lucas Kane finds himself in a fist fight with THE INTERNET with the fate of the world at stake (I'm not making this up). So that fight passes with another of the game's QTE sequences which have formed the basis of the gameplay so far. It's a fairly easy and anticlimactic fight in itself, but it's what comes after that really earns Fahrenheit its place on this list. After Lucas has beaten the Internet (again, this is supposed to be taken totally seriously), the Oracle, Lucas' nemesis and the agent of an ancient conspiracy seeking world domination, comes in holding Lucas' love interest, Carla, hostage at gunpoint. The player is offered two options; you can either give up and exchange the world-controlling macGuffin for Carla's life, or you can take your chances in a QTE where Carla grabs the gun, shoots the Oracle, and they all live happily ever after. Wow. First of all, this completely contradicts everything that's been established about the Oracle up to this point. He's been shown time and again to possess near-godlike powers and can kill with a glance, so why is he suddenly taking hostages and waving guns around like a regular mortal? Furthermore, this confrontation would be far more effective if it wasn't a "fight" at all. Carla's life, or the world's salvation, and the player has to choose. Offering a way out where everyone gets what they want ruins the poignant simplicity of that choice, rendering the story's ending neutered and forgettable. In a game where the plot derails into lunacy halfway through, this final confrontation is the crowning absurdity. Here's hoping Quantic Dream's upcoming Heavy Rain doesn't suffer the same fate.

Geez, it seems that Ubisoft are making a play for kings of this list, what with two other entries and now this one. The final act of the Sands of Time sees the Prince climbing the palace's final tower, trying to catch Farah who has left ahead of him with the Dagger of Time with a mind to seal the Sands away herself. When the Prince eventually fights his way through the hordes between him and the top of the tower, he gets there too late, Farah dead before he arrives. The stage seems set for a dramatic and tragic showdown with the Vizier over Farah's broken body. This, however, doesn't happen. Before the Vizier can get his hands on the Dagger, the Prince grabs it and plunges it into the Hourglass, reversing time and essentially resetting reality to before the Sands were unleashed. The game's central dramatic dynamic, that of the Prince's efforts to save both the world and his beloved from the taint of the Sands and the greed of the Vizier, is promptly truncated at the last moment without the resolution it seemed to demand, and so easily could have achieved. Instead, the Prince confronts the Vizier in the past, the Sands safely contained and Farah alive and well (and not even knowing who he is). It doesn't help that the fight is also insultingly easy: the Vizier hides behind a curtain, wheezing and coughing, sending clones of himself to fight you one by one. In a game where the element of the combat that made it challenging was facing crowds of enemies at once and holding them at bay, the Vizier presents no such difficulties. The Vizier clones block a great deal and their defenses are difficult to penetrate, but their attacks are no more damaging than the average enemy's, so beating them eventually turns into a battle of attrition until their, and his, inevitable downfall. Pity. Sands of Time, unlike its next-gen successor, is an otherwise excellent game, and snatches defeat from the jaws of victory in its last hour, delivering disappointment where there should have been triumph.

I though Mirror's Edge was an excellent game. I loved the free running, I loved the aesthetic, I loved the music, I loved the level design. I considered it basically a success in every regard but one; it is a prime example of how NOT to tell a story within the medium of videogames. A convoluted mess that trips over its own feet trying to rework the whole freedom-fighters-in-dystopian-city schtick that we've seen done in so many books, films and games that it's hard to believe there's any permutation left to try, the levels are punctuated by cryptic conversations with NPCs and bookended by jarring animated scenes that offer exposition so fragmentary that I was completely lost by the third of nine chapters. At the game's end, Faith penetrates to the heart of... some kind of conspiracy... I guess... which is holding her sister captive, has killed her boss, and to whom her best friend has defected. She fights and sneaks her way up to the helipad atop the tallest building in the city, only to be confronted by her sister being held hostage by... Jacknife. Who's Jacknife, you ask? Um... some smarmy NPC you meet in chapter 2 and never see thereafter, I guess. Despite his rambling explanation, I have a hard time implicating him in the intervening events. Jacknife backs onto a helicopter with Faith's sister (I forget her name) held at gunpoint, a SWAT team emerge onto the helipad behind Faith, and suddenly control is restored to the player! You vault over one barrier, slide under another, jump into the helicopter and kick Jacknife out the other side... and that's it. You Win. Game Over. Wow. That was a weirdly straightforward solution to the problem. No frantic, extended free running chase or anything, just rolling credits! Yeah. Future writers for videogames, take heed. Mirror's Edge is the way to NOT do it.

...And here we are at last, at the climactic anticlimax, the moment that left me truly dumbfounded at its inadequacy and which spurred me to write this list. It's a damn shame too, because when all is said and done, Fallout 3 is a pretty good game. It manages to defy the uneven and unfocused pacing that tends to plague a lot of open-world games and manages to deliver some truly impressive and inventive set pieces over the course of its main quest. In the finale, it seems set to deliver the biggest and most imposing of them all - a pitched battle between the Brotherhood of Steel (your friends) and the forces of the Enclave. It begins well, the Brotherhood deploying a gigantic battle robot from the pre-war era to break through the Enclave's vanguard, the player and the other soldiers following in its wake, dodging through the Enclave's artillery shells. The scenario takes a turn for the worse, however, when you realise that the brunt of the damage is being done by the 'bot, who breaks though wave after wave of Enclave troops without any significant imposition upon its progress, leaving only scraps for the player to deal with. Once the party reach the Jefferson Memorial where the Enclave are holed up, the game only proceeds to still murkier depths of anticlimax. There's a brief and unsatisfactory shootout with Enclave troops through a couple of rooms inside the Memorial, easily resolved through sheer weight of firepower, before the player emerges into the Rotunda to confront the final antagonist, Colonel Autumn. A confrontation which might well have been more dramatic were it not for the fact that Autumn is an NPC who was only introduced to us in the game's penultimate chapter, barely having time to asign his role in the story before the player kills him. And make no mistake, kill him you shall, and very, very easily. As in, with two headshots using VATS targeting. The game doesn't even try to make it hard for you; he's standing directly in front of you as you enter the room. It's possible to argue that this is really more of an execution than a boss fight, similar to the final sequence in The Darkness, and thus doesn't qualify for the list. I say, however, that even if it isn't a boss fight, it CLEARLY SHOULD BE. Fallout 3 barely even tries to come between the player and their final objective, and what really makes this intolerable is the depth and scale of the experience it could have delivered. Consider the volume and versatility of the gameplay features that Fallout 3 offers over the course of the game. Specialised weapons, player customisation, the VATS aiming system, the wide open environment, labyrinthine dialogue trees, computer hacking, lock picking... all of these features could have been used in a myriad ways to create a genuinely involving and grandiose finale, and all of them were rejected in favour of a brief, linear and uneventful shootout culminating in the effective execution of an antagonist whose fate we have scarcely any reason to care about anyway. The level of squandered potential is mind-boggling, the very definition of anticlimactic. Colonel Autumn meets precisely none of the criteria required to be an at all effectual or dramatic final challenge, and stands as a testament to everything that all important final confrontation is not and should never, ever be.

So that's that, ten distinct ways not to manage a final boss fight. They're dobtlessly a finicky thing for developers to get right; it's by no means easy to come up with a conclusion which fully realises and encapsulates everything that makes a game work. I hope this list hasn't dampened your enthusiasm for the holy Final Boss Fight though; when they get them wrong, they crash and burn, but for every game which doesn't quite cut it, there are many others which do. For instance: Final Fantasy X; Metal Gear Solid 3; Beyond Good & Evil; God of War I and II; Zone of the Enders - The Second Runner; Shadow of the Colossus; Prototype; pretty much any entry in the Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter franchises, and many, many others. Keep on playing to the end, because more times than not, it's worth it!

List by Zaothus (09/21/2009)