The Final!

You've tracked down the princess, solved all the villagers minor squabbles and are ready to end it once and for all. It's time to fight the Final Boss.

Final Bosses are the culmination of everything you have accomplished in your time with the game. All that you have learned gets put on the test in this final exam. Final Boss' are the developers most important weapon; it is in the final boss fight where players set their impression of a game in stone, and a weak final boss can ruin what is an otherwise astounding game. Just like a fireworks display, we feel disappointed if the final bang doesn't give the biggest boom. Unlike a fireworks display, the Final Boss must tie together all of the narrative points, gameplay experiences, art aesthetics, and musical themes for a single moment of connectedness. The Final Boss is the time when you want your audience to finally understand everything that the game has been trying to say. From the tireless perseverance of Mario's search for the missing Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros., to the crushing fate of death in Persona 3, it must all be encapsulated in this final climactic scene.

Final Bosses come in all shapes and sizes. They can be multiform monstrosities that eventually shapeshift into building size blobs of flesh, or they can be a normal human being. For the most part, however, Final Boss' tend to sit in two categories: human-esque opponents and what I define as the more monstrous encounters. The following videos present a view of these two categories:

Human Type - Final Fight with Ganondorf from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
-(note there are three fights before this one)


Monster Type - Mother Brain from Super Metroid:
-skip to


I will say that both of these are considered examples of extremely good Final Boss fights, with the Mother Brain fight from Super Metroid known as one of the best boss fights in video gaming (how much of this is rose-tinted glasses is unclear as I am most certainly wearing mine). Bad Final Boss fights are a dime a dozen, and most games tend to end quite weakly, and usually on the wrong chord. One reason for this neglect, of what I consider to be the most important part of a video game, is that unlike movies or books, which most people finish eventually, video games rarely get finished. I myself had this problem, and only in the past four years or so have I really tried to get to the end of video games (time constraints coupled with most games averaging in at 50-60 play time to complete made me only invest in beating the games I really, really liked). Developers are aware of this, and so they spend the majority of their development time working on the beginning of their game, in order to hook players into investing their time (and more importantly money) into the rest of the game. Since the least amount of people will see the end of the game, why should they spend the most effort on it?

Still, I feel that a fantastic Final Boss can take even a mediocre game to the stars, and some games have been entirely defined to me (and my peers) by their final encounter. Perhaps the most haunting of all of these is the final boss of Earthbound (what the image up top is depicting).

Warning! These two videos will make very little sense to you without the context of the entire game. Try not to understand the plot, but instead focus on the way the music works together with the shifting background to convey a sense of hopelessness and dread.