Leroux: - Action games don't necessarily need bosses in order to be fun, and they certainly don't need scripted boss battles presented as arena fights that take away all the freedom of the regular gameplay and require you to learn patterns and counter them in predefined ways. Apparently many gamers like this or appreciate games upholding the tradition. I don't. I could live in a world without it. Rather than looking forward to boss battles, I groan when they approach and let out a sigh of relief when they're over and I can finally get back to what was fun about a game.
Breja: I agree. I usually dread boss battles, not because of their difficulty but because I hate that artificial, memorise-this pattern based war of attrition. Though excessive difficutly also isn't fun. Especially for final bosses. I get the thinking that the final fight should be tough, but if it's so hard I get stuck on it for too long the pacing of the whole game falls apart at what should be the climactic moment. You can't spend hours in a climactic fight and still have it retain any sense of urgency.
I don't generally like boss battles in action games (particularly in Megaman games, incidentally), but one game whose boss fight I did like is Celeste, particularly the Chapter 6 boss.
The way that boss fight works is as follows:
* To reach the boss, you need to go to a certain part of the room. As usual for Celeste, there's platforming involved, with everything that hurts being an instant kill. The twist is having to dodge the boss's attacks.
* Once you reach the boss, just dash into the boss, and they'll be knocked back further in the room. (Not even sure if the dash is necessary.)
* After a few times of this, the boss will move to the next room and you need to follow.
* If you die (which happens you get hit), you restart the room. Importantly, this is only the current room that you restart, not the entire boss fight. Hence, it *isn't* a war of attrition. (Unless you're doing a certain optional challenge that isn't even unlocked until you've unlocked every chapter in the game, including the ones unlocked after the B-sides.) Also worth noting that, if you quit the game entirely, when you reload you're back in the room you were in. (Also, note that there's no resource management between rooms; both the game's resources (dashes and stamina) recover when you touch the ground or certain other things.)
I like this boss, as it doesn't get rid of the platforming aspect of the game, it doesn't force you to do it all at once without dying, and it feels right in the context of the game. (Also, there's a non-violent interpretation of what you're during to the boss in this battle.)