Jonesy89: I will concede that bosses in a game like Hotline Miami need to go, at least when they resemble the ones in the game, as they break the flow and all that. However, I take issue with the idea that all bosses should be eradicated from all of gaming. A good boss should be a pinnacle of challenge, making the player use the skills that they have been practicing during the rest of the game to come out on top, not unlike some kind of gaming equivalent of an exam; however, unlike an exam, which can be a pain to study for and is ultimately not very fun, a good boss should add a touch of variety and ramp up the challenge in a creative manner. Throwing more and tougher enemies at the player achieves this goal somewhat, but in a way that lacks creativity and can only be pushed so far.
Don't get me wrong, there are games were a traditional boss is out of place and a more appropriate end game challenge substitute would be appropriate, but this is not the case for all gaming. Take the Legend of Zelda series; those games are full of bosses that require the player to utilize skills and equipment that the player has been using throughout the course of the dungeon/game and serve as climactic moments throughout the game. Taking away boss fights from a game series like that would only hurt it.
That's fair, but could there be any more "core gamer" a game than the Zelda series?
I'm struggling to think of them as anything but roadblocks in a game's progress. They almost always upset the rhythm of the game in a negative way in my experience. Human Revolution's are the most apparent of those, but there are others.
Think of Mafia or its sequel. What on earth are those games doing with bosses? It's a game conceit that appears in too many games. it would be like every romance movie needing a fistfight just because other, successful movies had it.
See the part of my response where I concede that bosses do not belong in some games. I've never played the Mafia games, but if I might supply my own examples, traditional bosses in, say, a Splinter Cell game or Hitman game are a bad idea. Splinter Cell and Hitman are primarily stealth games (albeit adopting different philosophies and methods of subterfuge), and the idea of having a boss rock out from the shadows requiring that you engage in a protracted firefight with them would make about as much sense as a Dadaist rendition of Alice in Wonderland; those games wisely eschewed boss fights in favor of ramping up the challenge in a manner that provided variety and high stakes while still keeping the game focused on the core gameplay. A universe in which all movies required a fistfight (or,indeed, [url=http://zeropunctuation.wikia.com/wiki/Silent_Hill:_Homecoming]a line dancing competition[/url]) would be moronic, but that's not to say that the equivalent phenomenon is present here; rather, we expect games to build to points of climax which may or may not involve a fistfight.
To the extent that this is a problem because developers think that they have to crowbar in bosses out of some misguided sense of tradition instead of in cases where they are actually determined to be a good idea, the issue seems less that bosses should be done away with and more that more software developers need to start putting more thought into the design of their product. Arguing for the removal of bosses under this rationale is akin to arguing that since everyone feels the need to include a fistfight in a film, all films must cease to have fistfights, even in films where such a scene would make sense; sure, you've fixed the problem of everyone mindlessly trying to cash in on something that they don't understand, but now the thing can't be used in situations where it can and arguably should be used. Hell, Half-life's emphasis on storytelling led to people trying to catch that same brand of lightning in a bottle by using cut scenes which ranged from good to unnecessary and bad; had we eradicated this particular trend from gaming, we would never have been able to play Half-Life 2, an amazing game that uses the same storytelling techniques as its predecessor to great effect. To go one further, if the entire trend of story-driven gameplay, which some games have admittedly run into the ground by shackling the player to poorly told and needlessly long winded plots, were to be subjected to this same rationale, then we might all be stuck playing plotless diversions that could never be considered works of art, while titles like Planescape Torment, Deus Ex, Silent Hill 2, and many other games with incredibly moving stories and fun gameplay would never come into existence.
tl;dr: just because some idiots don't know how to apply a certain concept, one should not be so quick to encourage that that concept be discarded entirely, preventing its proper application in the present and its possible future evolution.
