Ranticlimax: Inappropriate End Bosses

[Fair Warning: Some end-game spoilers for Mass Effect 2, Bioshock, Uncharted 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum follow!]

It’s the end of Back to the Future: Doc Brown is up on the clock tower, the storm is brewing and Marty McFly can’t get the DeLorian to start. Then, just in the nick of time, the ignition fires. But wait! Heading Marty off at the pass, a hulking MegaBiff Tannen charges in, dragging him out of the car and slamming him into a wall in a shower of bricks.

“Oh, man, this is heavy,” groans our hero, looking up at the huge form of his nemesis. MegaBiff bears down on Marty, smirking.

“I found out about your little Flux-Capacitor punk. Now I’ve used the time circuits to harness the power of the lightning itself… hmm… yes, that’ll do. Anyway, soon I will become the most powerful human ever and Lorraine will be mine! You’d better make like a tree–” Before he can finish, Marty is on the run in a desperate bid to get the DeLorian moving.

MegaBiff’s laughter resonates around the street and he calls out, “That’s right… I always knew you were chicken.” Marty freezes, the camera zooming in on his eyes as he responds, voice shaking:

“Nobody. Calls me. Chicken.” The fight is on.

If that’s not how you remember the ending of Back to the Future, it’s because fortunately writer Bob Gale seemed to have some idea of what was dramatically appropriate, a trait many game designers would do well to acquire. Why is it that even in the best games, designers often lose all sense of narrative perspective when it comes to the final encounter?

The concept of an end boss in video games is so nearly ubiquitous that it’s hardly surprising that designers feel the weight of tradition bearing down on them. The theory is sound, too: giving the player a mighty foe is one good way of bringing events to a grand climax, particularly where there has been a well-defined nemesis that is just begging to be dealt with. I’m sure that one of the problems faced is how to make that nemesis sufficiently threatening when, in the game’s story, they are just an ordinary human being who should go down as easily as anyone else when cornered.

Enter the Beefed-Up Superhuman, common in end boss fights in recent years. Fontaine getting all spliced-up at the end of BioShock, The Joker getting injected with the big, mutant serum in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Lazarevic harnessing the power of magic sap in Uncharted 2 are all examples of the phenomenon and all narrative failures for similar reasons.  The story of Rapture’s downfall in Bioshock was a human one about failures of ambition, free will and sanity. Batman: Arkham Asylum may have been set in a world which is no stranger to big, beefy thugs but The Joker himself has always been a very psychological villain, something that is set up early on and then borne out through the vast majority of the game. Uncharted 2‘s Lazarevic was a broadly but still well-painted villain, utterly ruthless and possessed of a cold, unflinching menace. In all cases, this hard work was undermined to a greater or lesser extent by ignoring what was needed to satisfy the story in favour of what is essentially a monster battle for a climax.

If ever there were a cautionary tale about the dangerous allure of the Big End Boss, however, it has to be Mass Effect 2. Bioware so very nearly got it right: in a story mainly about recruiting an elite team and earning their loyalty, the finale is all about using that team and testing that loyalty. People are reasonably likely to die and the stakes are high enough to make it matter. A multi-stage attack in which your own decisions affect who makes it back alive, it neatly distils everything that was set up through the course of the game. Neatly, that is, were it not for the elephant in the room.

I could have easily envisaged the climax to Mass Effect 2 as a series of increasingly crushing decisions that the player had to make. Perhaps this would culminate in a big battle with the collectors or Harbinger himself but it would mainly be about making big choices. The game flirts with these ideas, as you choose squads and decide how to deal with The Illusive Man’s request, but it chickens out at the last moment and drops what is essentially a giant Terminator between you and victory.

As a force of evil, the Reapers are conceptually excellent. Always surrounded by a certain amount of mystery, their will to destroy is infinite and their motivations unknown. They go about their plans with a cool, machine-driven confidence that they will succeed as they have done so many times. Any attempt to explain their reasonings would work against this basic malevolence so it’s hardly surprising that the revelation that they are trying to construct a “Human-Reaper” comes off as a disappointment.

That said, it is actually the thematically mismatched way in which the Human-Reaper is designed that hurts the most. While the world of Mass Effect is awash with striking and somewhat retro-futuristic design, beyond that it is basically grounded in reality. It takes place in a somewhat fantastical version of a real future rather than an over-the-top comic book world. However, the Human-Reaper seems like something that belongs firmly in the latter, with its novelty-sized syringes, giant robot aesthetic, glowing eyes and big stompy fists.

Developers have themselves a challenge to figure out other ways to handle the final encounter in video games. They need to start getting this right and that means stepping back, looking long and hard at whatever lurching beast they are planning and asking themselves, while there’s still time to reconsider: “Actually, is this what the game needs right now?”