The End from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Does reading Level Up sometimes feel like drinking water from a fire hose? Or surfing a tsunami? Does it ever give you the sensation that you've been buried under an avalanche of words, words, words? Yes, we know that the dizzying length of certain Level Up posts can read more like a manifesto or a jeremiad than a blog entry. For you, we offer the occasional feature "Things You May Have Missed," which will cull compelling excerpts from our more voluminous posts.

Today's entry comes from the September 17th-20th edition of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, wherein we discussed the games BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. During our email conversation, we raised the question of how both games handled boss battles, and why more videogames need to study Metal Gear Solid 3 to learn how to reinvent boss fights for the modern era. Read on.

Stephen Totilo: Since we've spoiled just about everything else in the game during this Vs. Mode I'm going to do ONE MORE SPOILER now...

...and mention that the last thing you fight in the game is a Chewbacca-sized Fontaine. He looks, acts and talks like a super-villain. He's a stereotypical, megalomaniac of a game-ending boss. He attacks in patterns. To beat him, you duck and cover. You might as well be fighting the villain at the end of an X-Men game. There's little connection in tone, theme or even gameplay to what BioShock established before it. It's as if 2KB-A-I ran out of ideas just a little too soon. Not that this didn't cut into the game's many perfect scores. All's well even if it doesn't end well, apparently.

You asked me what I thought of the boss encounters in BioShock and Prime 3. If we consider Big Daddys as bosses, I like BioShock's better. I enjoy the novelty of stumbling upon such formidable enemies in surprising locations. Prime 3, like most games, telegraphs the appearance of a boss. You can tell when you're about to fight one, when you've entered a room where one is about to emerge. In BioShock, the opportunities come as surprises. BioShock's other bosses are less interesting. They fit the mold of many game bosses. They are enemies that are arbitrarily granted more power than others, a character programmed to survive a headshot or 20 bullets to the abdomen, because, well, he's a boss and won't die as easily as a random grunt. There may be some narrative rationale to them, but why, really, should the mad doctor be more resilient to bullets than his lieutenants? Because he'd the mad doctor? The fiction buckles to accommodate a game design cliché. The bosses in Prime 3, however, represent inspired convergence points in the two main avenues of the series' gameplay. They require the player to utilize both the offensive skills learned in combat with earlier enemies and the detective skills honed while exploring the game worlds' terrain. You don't just shoot these Bosses. You scan for a weak point, grapple and yank away armor plating, roll into a ball to bomb a guarded node, freeze puddles of fuel to make them lose their footing, etc. From a gameplay perspective, the Prime 3 bosses make sense. From a gameplay perspective, the non-Big Daddy BioShock bosses don't.

N'Gai Croal: Speaking of Metal Gear Solid 3, I haven't forgotten my promise to reveal my favorite boss fight of all time. It's the confrontation with The End. I still remember stepping into that area, seeing The End's intro cinema and thinking, "No, it can't be," only to enter the gameplay proper and realizing that, oh yes, it was indeed going to be a hide-and-seek sniper duel. A battle of wills, a test of patience, with numerous ways to accomplish the task at hand. The "holy s--t" moment for me came when I'd taken position atop a ridge and was scanning the other side of the map through my sniper rifle when all of a sudden I saw a glint of sunlight reflecting off the scope on his own weapon. I was gobsmacked, as they say.

What makes this a great boss battle is that it uses the tactical language that the game has already established--hide-and-seek-and-shoot--over a sizable three-stage area, rather than throw us into a shooter in an arbitrarily confined arena. Similarly, Metroid Prime's tactical language consists of dodging enemy attacks, exposing their vulnerabilities and using the most efficient weapons to defeat them, so its boss fights feel like a natural extension of the game's more exploratory parts where the enemies generally serve as temporary obstacles.

What is BioShock's tactical language? It consists of turning an initially unfamiliar and hostile environment to our advantage. Within that approach, we're generally granted the freedom to plan our attacks in advance, to set traps, to regroup by putting distance between ourselves and our enemies--or to go in guns-and-Plasmids blazing and hope for the best. This is an essential part of what makes BioShock great. But the final battle with Fontaine, which you rightly criticized, discards that vocabulary. In its place we get a highly pressured old-school boss battle, complete with patterned attacks and multiple stages, set in a confined arena. Maybe the finale shouldn't have been a boss fight, but rather a boss level, a new environment that we would have had to navigate, learn and master while alternately hunting down and being hunted by the powered-up Fontaine. To thine own self be true, BioShock.

P.S. As we were assembling today's installment of "Things You May Have Missed," we stumbled across a blog post by 1UP.com's Jeremy Parish expanding upon his EGM review of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. In his post, his criticism of Phantom Hourglass' bosses echoed our own. Here's what he had to say:

It probably doesn't help that I reviewed Zelda and Metroid Prime 3 simultaneously, effectively amplifying Nintendo's bad habits. Like the bosses. Oh, god, the bosses. Shane and I came to a consensus: Nintendo only knows how to make two kinds of bosses. The first is defeated by deflecting its own projectiles back at it; the second by using a newly-acquired weapon to reveal a weakness, then attacking savagely (repeat three times). Sometimes they get really ambitious and combine the two! This describes almost every single boss in these two games.

To make it extra painful, I had been playing through Metal Gear Solid 3 for the first time and literally put down the controller to play Zelda and Metroid right after defeating The End. That is your classic night-and-day difference right there: Unlike Nintendo's increasingly stale and tediously predictable battles, The End defied every expectation one has about boss encounters. It wasn't frantic, you weren't exposing weaknesses, and your opponent is actually substantially weaker than you are on normal difficulty. Yet it was no less intense for its slow, measured pace, and victory can be achieved through myriad techniques. My approach employed practically every piece of equipment in Snake's possession. It was absolutely brilliant and really made me realize how clichéd your average video game boss is...especially in Zelda.

Here endeth our summary. To read the entire four-part exchange, click here.