Fire Emblem, in broad strokes, is a game about the units you choose and the strategy you employ deciding the fate of your playthrough and the characters within. This is, until you come face to face with a boss, where, in 90% of cases, your victory is assured no matter what inputs you give. They won’t move, they always give you the first strike, and they rarely, if ever, have more options to fight you than you can count on one hand.
This sucks, and for several reasons. One could point out the pacing of these fights, how essentially, the game comes to a grinding halt waiting for you to kill one bastard on a gate. One could take issue with the difficulty: what strategy can there possibly be in killing a single enemy with no unique mechanics. What about story wise? Sure, it can make sense for a dilligent knight to wait on a gate to protect the people behind it, but what about opportunists, bandits, cowards, how many of Fire Emblem’s stationary bosses would realistically be stationary? I’d guess close to none.
While I could continue to bash my head against this problem that I’m pretty sure everyone is on the same page about(?), I’d instead like to talk about a game that does bosses well, what you can learn from it, and why making these changes to your bosses will make your game more fun.
Now, Dark Souls. Everyone knows it, and it has been discussed to death what makes Dark Souls a good video game, instead, let’s talk about Sekiro, a game that is popular enough that people know about it, but still makes me feel like more of a hipster.
Sekiro is a difficult game, I spent 6 hours fighting the final boss, split across attempts that lasted no more than 3 minutes each. But that difficulty isn’t for show, it is to teach you how the game works and how to have fun with it. My second run through of the entire game took less time than the final boss did, and that’s because I wasn’t allowed to beat any level of the game without understanding it.
For example, one of the crucial mechanics in Sekiro is the Mikiri Counter, a stomp that you can do on enemies that use unblockable stabs to deal massive posture damage. Right after you likely obtain the skill, there is a courtyard with a bunch of spear dudes who almost exclusively use these stabs, and they will kill you over, and over, and over again until you master that timing.
After that, you learn about a technique called lightning reversals, and the next boss coindentally uses lightning attacks. These attacks are designed to either one shot or close to it, to the point where the player needs to figure out how to reverse them in order to win. But, same deal, reversing them deals a massive amount of damage and stuns the boss, so you get a big reward from learning how the mechanic works.
There are more examples, but I think you get the point, these bosses are very strong, and are designed to make sure you’ve learned what the game is teaching, and because of that, they are very satisfying to defeat, and crucially make you better at the game for beating them.
Does this mean every FE boss needs to be brutally difficult? No. But a boss should serve a purpose, whether that is testing the player, or providing a fun experience, or simply being a part of the map.
Chapter 8 of Server 72 has you seize a spot in a guarded area to the southwest of you, with enemies in the way. The map is designed in such a way that there are a lot of walls and pillars, which crucially interact with Server 72’s line of sight mechanic, you cannot cast spells or use ranged weapons if your view of your target is obstructed. To make sure the player understands and can use this mechanic to their benefit, there is an assassin with an infinite range bow that will always hit and one shot any party member it targets. Not only is this a super fun map due to the boss’s very unique design, the design pulls double duty by being a skill check on your knowledge of sight mechanics.
Alright, so bosses should teach you something, gotcha. What else?
I think people have taken note of Engage bosses, notably how much more dynamic they feel compared to other Fire Emblem games, and I think that just comes down to mechanical depth. Zephia is more interesting as a boss than say…Julius, just because she has more things she can do than Julius does. She has more health, which means you might have to contemplate surviving an enemy phase with her on the field, her emblem ring gives her a lot of movement, so her enemy phase capabilities are enhanced, canter makes baiting her more complicated, overdrive is skill testing in terms of making sure you are positioned correctly (with the bonus that you can abuse her AI to lead her into misplaying into your whole army); just generally, an increase in boss options leads to more fun gameplay.
And Zephia is not alone in this, Mauvier with his warp staff, Marnie with Hold Out, Ivy with Adaptable, Divine Beasts in three houses, adding boss mechanics both makes these fights memorable and special, but also establishes a challenge by making the player manage new information.
While this can sound daunting, I understand “make more content” seems unhelpful as a prescriptive measure, even something as simple as making your stationary bosses move, giving them multiple, maybe even unique weapons, creating time pressure, and increasing their defensive stats can force players to think of ways around problems that aren’t just “use the Jagen”. In the same way that the player will appreciate them having unit and weapon variety, having bosses that feel different from each other and have multiple ways of challenging the player will make their victories feel more earned and will engage them more than a simple lock and key armor knight boss.
Again, Server 72 is great at this, but other games like The Unbroken Thread, Embrace of the Fog, Drums of War, and TMGC have excellent boss fights that people should take inspiration from. And I would also recommend going outside the SPRG sphere for inspiration as well. SMT, Baldur’s Gate, the Souls Games, Octopath Traveler, they all have boss fights that are iconic for a reason, and the mechanics that they use often are either transferable or at least are good for sparking similar ideas. Multi-phase boss fights, while I think should be used sparingly to prevent pacing issues, are always a treat, as you, as the player, get to feel the boss evolve with how you are fighting it.
And then, finally, I think a boss needs to have presence, and what that means can differ from boss to boss. Server 72, great game that it is, has a lot of bosses with ranged attacks, and I don’t mean 2 range. The assassin boss I mentioned before has tons of presence, he can target nearly the whole map. The boss of floor 20, which is stationary by the way, has an infinite range 3 damage AOE he can fire off each turn. The boss of floor 30 summons adds as he moves, which block your way back to the start of the map. The boss of floor 35 warps around constantly, and you have to chase him down to get each kill. The boss of floor 40 has an attack where she warps around and performs an uncounterable attack on each of your characters, and she has a mechanic where she targets a character, and if any of your units are around where they were at the end of the turn, they get shot for 99 damage.
What this means is that you are fighting the boss from minute 1. Make the map the boss, make the minions the boss, make the terrain the boss, make the game mechanics the boss, there are so many ways to have a boss make a meaningful impact on the map when you aren’t fighting them, and that both builds up suspense for the player’s confrontation with them, and again, gives them mechanical challenges that foreshadow the boss’s style and what they are capable of.
An excellent example of a boss with presence, despite the fact that they have no unique items, are easily one shot-able, and have no extra health bars or anything else that gives them longevity is Conquest Iago. His role in the map is very simple, while you are in his range, he cycles between four offensive staffs to weaken your units, and he feels incredibly present on the map by virtue of forcing you to respect his influence.
Two maps after, Takumi does a very similar thing. His AOE is a cool mechanic that forces you to interact with the map to block it, and the entire map feels like a part of the boss, because it is fighting tooth and nail to strip you of resources and force you towards confronting Takumi very quickly. It has stakes, it has drama, partially because it is hard, but also because the map is cohesive with the boss.
If you focus on giving your bosses presence, mechanical depth, and something to teach or test the player, it’s going to pay dividends to your game in multiple ways. Good boss design leads to good villains, having a tight mechanical theme will directly impact how people view your story. Good bosses are also helpful for pacing, it disrupts the gameplay cycle and gives you a different fun way to use the game mechanics. They also just really help the memorability of your game, think of how iconic Mustafa is from Awakening, just because he has one good story moment. Having one good gameplay moment can do the same thing.
If you feel the same or differently about what makes a good boss, please reach out; with both Engage and recent FEU projects, I feel like people are finally breaking away from the mold of boring, cookie cutter bosses, and I’d really like to both discuss what makes that possible and celebrate the games that have already managed to do it successfully, and the bosses in them that have stuck out to you.
I’ve probably made 4/5 versions of this post and never published it, so hopefully, if nothing else, this was a fun and informative read. An earlier version of this post had me talk more about successful bosses in the main series, so if you need more inspiration or were curious, here are the ones I like.
Fe4: Arion
Fe5: Early Galzus
Fe7: Ursula, The Final Map Bosses
Fe11: Gharnef
Fates: Iago, Final Map Takumi, Anonkos, Hinoka
Three Houses: A lot of demon beast fights, Blue Lions final boss, Crimson Flower Dedue/Dimitri and final boss
Engage: Any boss with an emblem ring or against an (non-dlc) emblem, Sombron
