Bison or Psycho Mantis or Atheon, they’ve all served as finish lines, final examinations, and feats of collaboration. In a medium where individual experiences can now vary greatly - no two people play Minecraft the same way, nor do any two games of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds even remotely resemble one another - bosses remain a common experience, cultural touchstones for entire generations of games and the people who play them. What this big-bad revival reminds us is that we’re better off with bosses in our gaming lives. And there’s Destiny, a series that brought bosses back in a big way by borrowing ideas from massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, making them nigh-insurmountable challenges that required teamwork from a large group of players. Runaway sleeper hits like Shovel Knight nakedly emulated and updated 8- and 16-bit sensibilities, where challenging levels were par for the course and boss fights took center stage. Souls and its sequels/spinoffs inspired countless imitators to such an extent that ‘ Souls-like’ is now a genre descriptor. Demon’s Souls had already embraced the opaque design and challenges of classic games, adding names like Ornstein and Smough to the wince-inducing canon of legendary video-game big bads. Then a wave of nostalgia brought the boss back. Open-world and online games flourished, player choice became paramount, and boss fights in games that felt otherwise wide open - like the notoriously underwhelming boss confrontations in otherwise acclaimed games such as Bioshock or Deus Ex: Human Revolution - ended up feeling like dead weight. Bosses were effectively bottlenecks at a time where games were expanding. ”įor much of the 2000s, it seemed as if the concept of the video-game boss was on its last legs. After much deliberation, we have determined that Guitar Hero 3 ’s “Through the Fire and Flames” and Top Gun ’s “Aircraft Carrier” are more Levels than they are Bosses, and we have recategorized them accordingly. We had to, since FromSoftware games somehow keep getting harder.

We originally published this list in 2017, and have updated it to reflect the most recent, cutting edge advancements in boss difficulty.

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