The Zelda Pattern - How to Spice Up Bland Game Boss Design ~ Design Doc 

My biggest issue is that there is often no POINT to the boss making sure you mastered the item, because there's a decent chance you'll rarely or never need it again. They'll be some exceptions, notably the hookshot usually, but often thats the final exam an hour after you got it

Ghirahim is a good example of an exception to the pattern. Instead of shooting him with your beetle thingie you just got, the fight is all about your swordsmanship

I feel like most Zelda bosses would fit better as mid-bosses in dungeons, allowing the player to prove that they know the basics before truly challenging them with more complex ideas and puzzles.

I do think some of the examples you provided at the beginning were a little meh, Jalhalla, Molgera, and Fyrus make use of multiple items at least, and especially for Fyrus, the solutions aren't as painfully immediately obvious. I feel like all these bosses needed were a second phase or so to shake things up, but not much else. But generally, I do agree. The bosses were almost always WAY too easy, which is a bit unfortunate, and the only games with really good boss designs are the 2D games, and honestly, Spirit Tracks is pretty solid too I do have to say though, while BotW has the potential to help shake things up, I don't think the bosses found in that game are very good. Versatile in how you tackle it, sure, but the fact is, that almost always ends up resulting in you just headshotting them a bunch and wailing on them afterwards, rinse and repeat with very little effort. As versatile as the approaches could be, funny enough, I think, after the very beginning of the game (Great Plateau with the Stone Talus), those bosses are almost even easier than other Zelda games. I think a middleground would be great. The potential versatility of BotW, but with more unique approaches/requirements/appearances/items in general that the other games provide. With a second phase or two, as well. BotW has shown Nintendo's willingness to make games not super easy and also allow for player freedom. I think they just need to meet in the middle of where the other games were, and it'll be perfect.

Hades actually does an amazing job of teaching players how to beat the bosses by introducing multiple enemies that feature the boss's attacks. Asterius has a charge attack? Put in chariot chargers that chase you forever until you make them run into a wall. Theseus aiming a spear at you? Learn the timing of the reticle from a Shade minion and dodge at the last second. You dont really notice at first but once you realize what the games doing, you see how amazingly crafted it is

Say what you want about Zelda bosses, but Stallord was a fun boss.

The Bosses in The Adventure of Link deviated by not being fun at all.

Odolwa in Majora's Mask is one of my favorite boss fights. It's super intense for a first boss, and there are a bunch of different ways to go about it, and lots of things to pay attention to.

tbh, i feel that BoTW relies too much on the "eye weakness" method, the achilles' heel pattern, imo majora's mask handle a lot better boss fights, specially the first and last

I wish you talked more about majora's mask. Since every temple reward is an arrow the majority of the solutions is through the masks. The first boss could be hit in many different ways, and the second was more of a skill based challenge. I feel like that zelda like game in the middle was harder because of frustration. Architecture blocking projectiles, and not having time ti react feels like bad coding. The best enemies are the ones who use the items, but don't make a point-click win situation, you need to understand how the item works first.

Just want to point out that in Ocarina most bosses have multiple weaknesses, not just the dungeon item. On Gohma, you can kill her on the ground with Deku nuts and jump attacks, on Volvagia you can use the bow to hit him multiple times in the air and kill it with one hit of the hammer. Even the Witch Sisters you can use the longshot to reach them faster having more time to atack. In the last Nintendo leak, remains of an Boss Rush mode were found for OoT, similar to the one on the 3ds version. So, while everyone can kill the bosses figuring out the puzzle of how to use the key item of the dungeon to damage them, more skilled players will have fun trying to speedrun the fights and explore every single option they have to beat them faster each playthrough.

This reminds me a lot of one of Sid Meier's mantras: "Who's having the fun? The Designer or the Player?" A lot of bosses that require one particular way to be defeated fall squarely in the former category.

The setup of A Link Between Worlds does a wonderful job with the boss fights. Yes it still is mostly the “Zelda Formula” but for the most part you need to acquire the key item before the dungeon and use it to enter the dungeon. And Because you just need a lot of rupees to get a key item, there isn’t a set order of which dungeons to go to first. Within the dungeons, you pretty much use that one key item for the puzzles but in this game you also have to use the main mechanic of this game in every dungeon: turning into a painting and moving within the walls. It’s such a brilliant mechanic that is used everywhere in the overworld and in every dungeon. So in the boss fights you switch between 3 mechanics: the key item, the sword/shield, and the going in the wall ability. It’s a great use of adding another mechanic to add more depth to fights and puzzles. And in Lorule Castle, the final dungeon, and against the final boss, it uses those mechanics brilliantly! No spoilers! It’s one of my favorite Zelda final bosses.

That’s the Rub, making a Boss Fight interesting and yet making it build on what you’ve learned so far. That’s a real challenge.

I feel that out of all the games in the series, no Zelda game suffers from the Zelda boss pattern than the original Hyrule Warriors. Every single boss always had one or two moves in their repertoire that you had to wait for an opening on in order to knock them down to open their weakpoint gauge up, which wasn't too bad in the main story where most of the bosses are only fought like two times at most, but when you start going into the optional side modes, not only are you dealing with a boss in at least every other stage, but sometimes they even start throwing multiples at all at once, which combined with the side modes' ranking system on top of that, really made completing them an incredible chore and really soured my opinion on the game overall in the long run. Age of Calamity improved on this immensely just by increasing the amount of viable options you have during combat. Yes, you can fight bosses like the original by waiting for their weak point openings, but you can also open their gauge by doing stuff like hitting them with Poe rods or shooting them in the head like in BOTW, or using the environment to your advantage, like freezing enemies that are in the water with Cryonis or burning them by throwing bombs at nearby explosive barrels. And you can even extend the weakpoint gauge length using stasis, or make it go down faster by using elemental advantages like fire on an ice enemy. It's still not a perfect system, but it's so much faster and way more satisfying to take these foes down using all your abilities to your advantage.

Majora's Mask I've always felt like was an antithesis to this, though I suppose it's mainly due to the fact that the dungeon item in each area are the elemental arrows. This, however, makes some of the most memorable fights since you need to think on your feet and adapt to the bosses. Goht will always be such a cool fight, even if speedrunning has taken that edge off a little.

I totally thought the pattern you would decry was "wait for big glowy weak spot, hit big glowy weak spot, repeat."

I would say this pattern started in Link's Awakening rather than Ocarina of Time

I think Odolwa was a very underrated boss fight. It has a lot of unique attack patterns and you are expected to utilize your bow, bombs, or the deku mask, all of which were given to you prior to the dungeon. It has the Breath of the Wild enemy design philosophy while still testing your knowledge on the weapons you've had. I think it especially works in the context of Majora's Mask, where you can fight the bosses again later, with even more equipment. While it lacks in weapon variety, you get the transformation masks, which greatly change the gameplay. And all strategies can be viable, as long as you can properly rely on your reaction to their attacks.

one of my favorite Zelda bosses is Blind the Theif from Link Between Worlds. it's interesting because you don't really use a single item to defeat him. instead there's 2 phases. the first phese involves you attack him to get his guard up, only for you to merge onto the shied and sneak behind him, which is pretty clever. but the second phase has Blind toss the sheild aside as it turns into a all out brawl. it's a pretty easy fight, but it's fun for how it shifts half way through.

I find it hilarious that even as you talk about them, you don't seem to notice that the Twilight Princess bosses all need additional steps other than "Insert Bomb Here". Often with added stages and multiple items. Also, even funnier, you don't mention how the Dungeon's midbosses tend to present the ACTUAL raw combat challenge. Like Darknut. 12:24 - "No Boss in breath of the Wild is about one key item" >Shows boss that requires a specific Slate Power to beat.

It's been years since I played it so I might be remembering it differently but I recall Okami had the bosses have multiple means of getting you to use different celestial brush moves. Slashing back projectiles or opening the guard, redirecting elements in either their attacks or the battlefield, slowing down time with mist, using vines for mobility, and requiring sunrise just for a dramatic flair at the end. I think the Zelda boss pattern is just a symptom of the issue a lot of Zelda games have where the items are not so much an expansion of an arsenal but largely are treated as contextual puzzle solutions.

Surprised you didn't mention Majora's Mask, that game's bosses were really good in not having a single defined answer to defeating them (at least until the 3DS remake decided to ruin them...). Odalwa especially comes to mind as a boss that you can utilize numerous different strategies to defeat.

I’ve been waiting for this. Thank you!

BotW's bosses broke that mold... And are also the least memorable bosses in Zelda history. A few years after playing, I remember the Ganon fight. That's it. Its been nearly 20 years since I played Windwaker, but I still remember many of its fights and locations.

It's funny because that zelda formula is what me and my friend like about the game. And that is also one of the reasons non of use like Breath of the wild.

Maybe instead of getting the key item in the mid boss and then have that as a key for the dungeon boss, it would be better to get the key item right at the beginning of the dungeon (or before), let the mid boss be the game's test about your handling of the item and then let the dungeon boss be the one that has said item as a part of a larger thing.

I've been working on making a Legend of Zelda D&D campaign for awhile now, and have been implementing core items into the dungeon themes. It feels like a Zelda tradition, ya know? It could be fun for the players to get some cool freebies. But I'm also taking the approach that they are "suggestions" for solving puzzles and using against bosses. Let's be real- D&D players are likely to go out of their way to circumvent using the items anyways, just because that's what they feel like doing. And that's fine- they should be free to at least try tackling situations any way they want, and it'll be more fun. It's been fun to think of ways to make the bosses "vulnerable" to the items, like a Magic Boomerang or giant weapons that Strength Gauntlets would help with, but also give the players enough freedom that they can fight however they want, within reason.

the use of the “boss defeated” music from twilight princess in the outro is a really nice touch ❤️

I feel like the Imprisoned in Skyward sword did a great job of breaking this pattern. I like how you can attack from both above and below. I just wish it wasn't such a crap boss! And fighting it three times was not fun.

I don't know about this one. I found the bosses in Breath of the Wild quite uninteresting too. Against them, I just replicated the same strategy I used against regular monster: stun them by aiming for the eye, then go close to them and deals as much damage as I can until they attack again. But it might be because I overexplored and I was too powerful the first time, and I was too familiar with the game afterward to feel anything against those bosses. One fight we could learn from is Odolwa from Majora's Mask (MM64) and Majora's Mask 3D (MM3D). In MM64 we need to learn the pattern to know when we could stun them with the Bow, then swipe-swipe-swipe and it is done. Simple, yet dull because the boss is too easy. But we could also use the Bomb or the Deku Flower, adding variety in the fight. In MM3D, the developers funneled the players into defeated Odolwa in such a way it became dull as following a recipe with no place for imagination. We end up frustrated because MM64 is too simple but has more freedom, and MM3D might be "better" but guide you so much it became uninteresting. Maybe that is it: there is nothing wrong about the "Zelda's recipe". I am okay to have a predictable way to defeat the boss with the dungeon item. The problem is more that is the only way to defeat the boss, or the most effective way. I liked that I could use the grappling haak or the bottle against Phantom Ganon, or use Bombs and the bow against Volvagia in OoT. Maybe we need multiple ways to defeat a boss, including the obvious one with the dungeon item as long it is not the only way to defeat, nor the most effective way.

Okami is very similar with its bossfights (use the power you got from the dungeon to beat it), but, depending on how far you are in the game, you could always try out the powers you got before that to gain an advantage at some point. The combat is also different with three weapon types, many skills to learn and items to equip. Sometimes bosses even had some special quirks, like certain times where you can't use your powers.

Nintendo makes games doable for anyone, and me as a kid playing those bosses, i had a hard time!! I couldn't keep up with the boss... now that we are older people (teens included) we notice those patterns and makes them easy, i think the problem here is that nintendo doesn't try to appeal the audience that wants a challenge so they never make multiple difficultities

Using the Zelda pattern for early bosses (or dim players) is perfectly acceptable, but later bosses very much benefit from complications. Change up the environment, throw in some mooks, or break it up into phases with different patterns and fighting patterns. Note, I write for D&D bosses, hence the dim players comment (sometimes players are bad at thinking creatively).

I'm just thinking to Arin Hanson's sequelitis on similar premises before. I think about how if it weren't for its legacy, I don't think as many people would look at these games as highly

I think u have it all backwards. Botw bosses failed because you can hit them with anything, there is nothing special about those fights. The point of using the weapon you got from the dungeon isn't just its final test, its to show a different way to play, make sure you have the mechanic of that item AND so you don't just repeat the same way you killed the rest. When you can use any weapon you just pick the strongest and/or easiest way. Like in Alttp the bow has range and high damage so its gets used whenever you have choice. Also if you strait up copy a boss fight of course you have to add a little extra, that's why zelda can do the basic and the rest must add to it.

The Monster Hunter games subvert this pretty effectively. There are certain strategies or weaknesses to exploit for every big beastie you decide to tackle, but they’re optional for the most part. It all depends on if you need a leg up or if you can just stomp all over your target in the first place.

I like the main Guardian bosses in Metroid Prime 2. A test of the items you obtained up to that point in what I think are interesting ways that require good timing.

I really wish I could appreciate the Divine Beast Bosses more if they were more diverse. At the same time, Lynels are probably one of my favorite Zelda bosses, without even been a boss by itself.

i've complained about how you're forced to use certain items, you don't get to, stood out to me in twilight princess with how lame the ball and chain are for dealing damage.

Summary of the video: Do not make the boss fight linear. Do not male it so that there is only one way to defeat a boss. On top of that, make sure the items the player gets can be used for various situations, so the player cam strategies and decide for themselves which items are convenient for whatever situation approaches them. Make sure the player can choose their own method for defeating the boss.

I guess Zelda botw kinda out of the box. Like how thunderblight ganon is really suprised me the first time by how fast it moves, and I never thought to parry it's attack. Even to parry the guardians at least I need a few training first

How to be a Zelda boss 101: -Have eyes -??? -Profit

At the high school I'm attending (I live in Sweden, don't worry), I have a group of friends who're going to make a video game of their own later down the line. Maybe I should recommend them your videos and have them take some notes. 🤔

While I always liked the Zelda pattern, I do understand why others wouldn’t. And some variations do go a long way.

“Man, I love Zelda” Me too brother, you and me both

Hey, good job with the sponsor!!

Okay the King Gordon boss fight is awesome don't speak ill

It's worth noting that Zelda gets away with this, and why: LoZ isn't a game that's centered on combat. It's not about fighting challenging bosses. It's about exploring, and story. So the devs know they can rely on this simple repetitive formula for bosses. Time that could have been spent designing complex, interesting bosses instead goes towards other, more important-to-zelda-games things like puzzles, level design, and broader exploration aspects of the game.

2:02 listening to someone read can't get you literate, you need someone to teach you to read to become literate

I think Twinrova could have been improved by letting you use the Fire/Ice arrows if you'd found them, with the mirror shield as a backup.

does light ball tennis counts ?

Absolute mould breaker: goth (bull boss) from Stonetower Temple in Majora's Mask. It's essentially a mario kart style death race around a circular track.

The dungeon item being needed to defeat the dungeon boss is not too much of a problem. The real problem is that a lot of items have no use outside their specific dungeon.

I think the biggest sin of patterns like these are when the dungeon item itself is *rarely* useful after the boss fight you needed it for. Twilight Princess was awful about this, as the Ball & Chain, Spinner, and Dominion Rod are all used very sparingly outside their dungeons of origin. The latter two of which are also extremely rigid in their use-case so they feel less like "tools" in your arsenal and more like "key items" you have to equip on occasion.

Shadow of the Colossus changes the triangle with a factor not done too much in Zelda: Physics. SotC has the most samey pattern to every colossi you fight but physics play a factor in how you get to those weakpoints and how you beat their "puzzle" some even let you skip their puzzle entirely if you know where to jump and vault.

I don't have a problem with the Zelda boss formula in theory. They come across more as puzzle fights than something meant to be a test of raw combat skills. Although I admit they could be improved with a bit of mixing up or being made more complex sometimes. It's kind of a shame that Twilight Princess suffers from this rigid boss structure so much too, since it has probably the most in depth sword combat system of the series. Some of the minibosses make good use of it, but then a lot of the major bosses feel really scripted like they're not really posing any threat. Cool to see a shoutout for Darksiders. Those games tend to get overlooked too often. I was half expecting a mention of CrossCode though. That game has some bosses that get pretty wild with integrating puzzles. Although I guess they're mostly towards the end of the game, so perhaps that's too spoilery.

3:08 I feel like it should also be noted that it's possible to beat Ghoma without slingshot by stunning her with Deku Nuts. Just an asterisk on the subject.

I get the feeling the problem being highlighted here isn't actually what's being discussed. My understanding is that the discussed topic is repition and simplicity whereas the highlighted issue is actually downtime. There's a lot of breathing space in the games in line with Nintendo's accessable difficulty level. The Darksiders example and stand out Zelda boss exmaples share a key feature. In between openings, the player has a task to do such as dodge or prepare an attack. Other than that they still share the repetitive structure that's being discussed in other boss battles. I think the better takeaway here is to designg your bosses to have less empty time where the player is simply waiting and add in dynamic tasks in line with your desired difficulty.

i feel bad for majora's mask, cause it didnt have this issue as much in the original

Magic energy tennis? You dare disrespect the Dead mans volley? Oh, you’ve angered the gods now!

I dislike that most of these fights force you to wait a lot, just running around avoiding pretty basic attacks. I appreciate greatly that Breath of the Wild does away with that for the most part, as you're heavily incentivised to find your own opportunities to attacks. Most boss enemies in that game don't have dedicated openings to let you wail on them after they do an attack. Only a bit of a pity that it's arguably a bit too easy sometimes. While monsters like the Hinox will eventually protect their eye if you try to aim at it with your bow, most other enemies will not adjust like that, at which point you can just kind of spam arrows at the weak point until they're dead. The Blight ganons are particularly guilty of this. A notable example *before* BotW, and among the 3D games to boot, is Ghirahim. For a game that's pretty formulaic in its design overall, I really like that as the first boss, Ghirahim breaks the mold completely. The Beetle is not used in the fight whatsoever and instead it decides to test your understanding of the core swordfighting combat. At first it's just a simple case of "don't telegraph your swings", something the Bokoblins have already attempted to teach the player by that point, though Ghirahim is more likely to punish recklessness as he can steal your sword if he blocks it. Pretty basic, though not especially thrilling. The second phase is more interesting, because you have a lot of ways to fight Ghirahim. While you do have to wait for Ghirahim to make the first move to land a hit on him, you don't just have to wait out his attacks until he exposes himself. In fact, attempting to do so will make this fight quite slow and painful. Instead, you're heavily incentivised to quickly react to his attacks and counter them directly. Thanks to this, the fight feels much less like a waiting game than most 3D Zelda bosses and makes the challenge as a whole feel much more interactive. You'll progress the battle much more quickly if you're carefully deflecting daggers, shield bashing his rushes or punishing the wind up of his own sword swings directly. He comes back again later for a round 2, serving both to reinforce the rivalry between Link and Ghirahim and to test your understanding of the combat again, now requiring you to adjust a lot more quickly (and again the fight has nothing to do with the dungeon item). This means Ghirahim breaks the pattern more than once and the reycling of a boss this way doesn't feel tacked on, either. Nintendo definitely got their effort's worth with Ghirahim as he stands out as a very memorable boss, compared to most of the rest. I enjoy him quite a bit.

It's a hard but necessary balance to keep in line with the "legend" of the series while still being unique, especially with bosses. Like if you're going to have Ganon in every other game, you can't use the same format every time. Twilight Princess' final boss had some new interesting segments with Ganon, but with other bosses like Ghoma I want to see some variation if you're having them in multiple games.

The botw bosses may be open ended, but all four feel relatively the same and some still have their phases where you have to do a certain thing.

The thing is that most Zelda bosses from OOT and onwards were less of a boss and more of a puzzle. The focus of the bosses weren't the combat: it was on solving the puzzle on how to defeat the boss. It makes a bit of sense since you spend most of your time in dungeons solving puzzles. So, the perfect way to end a dungeon would be a puzzle (which in this case is the boss battle.) Also, combat in plenty of Zelda games is something that you can do in the game, but not the focus of the game. So, since combat was so overly simplistic in Zelda games, it didn't make much sense to have boseese that relied too much on combat. So, Nintendo made bosses in Zelda games to have a simplistic combat since they didn't want to make bosses where the combat was the important part of the fight: they just wanted to make a big puzzle to end each dungeon.

Hell, even when they're in-pattern, the execution wildly varies between _yawn_ and top 10 bosses in the series. The big bone dragon is really cool, esp. with the fakeout.

A Link Between Worlds has some interesting takes on the bosses, since there isn't really a key item but a slew of ones you can rent and later buy, then upgrade. Some bosses do necessitate the use of a specific item to reach or damage the boss but others can be fought however. The boss of the Thieves Den having you merge onto his shield was a neat way to incorporate the 2d mechanic

Good point all around, although I think it's worth noting that this is partly a genre issue. Except for BOTW which is an intentional departure, Zelda is not a series with a heavy focus on combat, and I don't think it's a necessity that challenging = better when sometimes the purpose of a boss fight can be different than offering a challenge (such as telling a story or offering a puzzle). Not everything in video games should be analyzed through the lens of challenge, especially not a challenge in the sense of testing someone's reflexes/mastery of the battle system.

Well done link, you've mastered The Spinner! Now, put it away for most of the game.......what? Why are you looking at me like that?

i always liked this system in zelda games though - the dungeons were always such a complete experience where you would learn new things and get new items and it would all build up to the final boss fight. you could learn what to expect and how to beat it as you played the dungeon. i was also very young, so even these "easy" boss fights weren't so easy for me.

Despite showing clips of Barinade, I actually quite like that boss even if it is very dependent on the dungeon item. I think what helps sets Barinade apart is the the speed of the fight and the variety in its patterns. Sure the entire fight utilizes the boomerang, but Barinade throws enough at you to where you have to pay attention, for an early boss anyways. Also the fight moves pretty quickly, the only time where Barinade cannot be attacked is the final phase but it only lasts a couple of seconds, compared to other bosses with much larger gaps between their vulnerability. Its not a perfect boss by any means, but I do think its one of the better examples of a boss being reliant on a single main item and still being fun, at least to me

You call it an issue, but I actually like this I completely agree on the Minish Cap boss, but I completely disagree on Breath of the Wild. In Breath of the Wild, instead of having a really epic sequence, all the enemies can be dealt with in the same way if you so choose. Minish Cap really struck the balance the best. I like getting a key-item in a dungeon and using it on the boss. I can definitely understand getting you to use items you've gained previously as well as the new ones too, that IS really fun. But just turning it into a "Oh you can just swipe swipe with your sword if you want, but you can also use bombs or whatever else, I don't care" isn't a winning formula.

Design Doc: “I love Zelda” Me too!

Honestly I have very little problem with the formula. I always saw the bosses more as puzzles than fights that were supposed to be challenging. I missed the formula a lot in BotW to be honest. There were some stinkers in the older games like the 2nd boss in Skyward Sword, but in general I thought they were more fun than BotW’s fights. Some of those just came off as damage sponges.

I like the simple predictability of dungeon bosses. I like the general ease of the games. I don't really feel it's something that needs to be fixed. But I also tend to dislike fight mechanics in general and thought the bosses in BotW where dull and unmemorable, so I'm pretty biased against it. I'd be ok with more LttP style bosses where the item isn't as vital to completing the fights, but still have variety in how they're approached

I think the "Zelda pattern" is perfectly fine as the series is intended for all ages. Something like Darksiders is clearly intended for teens and up, so a more complex structure to fights likely won't overwhelm younger players of the intended audience.

I actually like the Skeleton boss in Twilight Princess where you use the spinner. The pattern is vaguely there, but the situation make it more exciting.

Mobs accompanying the boss don't seem like they would jive well with the lock-on mechanics in most 3D Zeldas. As for the predictably of using the dungeon's key item, I'm a big fan. It could just be the limited ability that sprites have to convey information, but a key component of the boss fights in early 2D games was trying every item in your inventory to damage the boss.

One of the more interesting bosses in the series was Ramrock from Oracle of Ages. He's a bit of a gimmick boss, but it shows how you can use obstacles to remind players about abilities they haven't used for a while. He actually requires several items to defeat as he summons different defenses, and every time you die you have to walk through a puzzle room that requires you to use items in the same order needed to defeat him.

I think using the Zelda pattern rigidly works perfectly fine for all your bosses if the item isn't required to either deal damage or expose the boss' weak point. This means that you are encouraged to use the quest item, but using it is only required for a fraction of the fight. Unworthy has several great examples. Gaston and the Dancer of Thorns both have attacks that will one-shot you unless you use a particular item (the hammer and the spirit bow), but you are otherwise free to fight however you want. Father Amandil, on the other hand, puts up a barrier in the middle of his arena that you can't get through unless you use the spirit bow to teleport through, but otherwise can be dealt with as offensively or defensively as you want since he teleports to both sides of the arena at will. Iconoclasts had a similar fight against the Carver, where you have to charge up your electric wrench to avoid an attack, but otherwise got to fight however you wanted. Even if this fight did follow the Zelda pattern, it would still have great fights because most have a handful of singular 1-off gimmicks and tests of general skill rather than requiring the use of any particular item.

Honestly, I never had a problem with the pattern. And... thought it was kind of a shallow observation. For me the issue with Zelda bosses was a matter of difficulty, not structure. You know, being more aggressive, having more demanding attack patterns, force the player to move around the environment more, dealing more damage, etc. I never thought using the dungeon item was a flaw. And honestly, it's funny how you put BotW as if "got it right", when in reality it's one of the most criticized aspects of the game. Not in a "well, they're not perfect" kind of way, but in a "man, these bosses suck!" kind of way. While Twinrova is an iconic boss in OOT because how novel the use of the Mirror Shield was, even if the novelty wares off, people already has forgotten what the fight against the Ganon Blights was. And mostly because fighting them came down to "just hit it until it dies". So no, having to use one specific item to create an opening is not the issue here. If anything, taking that away exposes the real issue even faster. There are exceptions, of course, but those are... precisely the bosses that do what I mentioned before: the Lynel, Thunderblight Ganon and the DLC monk still have the "hit it until it dies" strategy, but their attack patterns and aggressiveness is what makes them compelling.

If they combined Breath of the Wild style bosses with classic Zelda dungeon/over-world/item design, I would give Nintendo all of my money. I know that some of my opinions are in the minority, but I hated BotW weapon degradation and the openness of its world. I much prefer a world like LttP where you can explore, but the area you can explore expands as you gain new abilities.

So, don't do the "one item, one kill" method, basically. I can agree with that. After all, the best puzzles are the ones with multiple solutions.

I see Darksiders and I press like.

One side-point I've often considered is how this "lock and key" function of items against bosses hurts variety in another way. We have problems that require a specific item and only that, and at the same time we see items have little use outside of their specific locks. By the end of the games you're absolutely flooded with an arsenal of tools, but more often than not it's just your sword and whatever is absolutely required that you'll be using.

Never really had a problem with this. Zelda games were never really designed around their combat, so ending each dungeon on a more puzzle-based encounter is a better solution in my eyes. Some of them could stand to be more difficult, but I much prefer the item-based design compared to a combat-oriented one, especially since most Zelda games are fairly rudimentary in that regard. Plus, it gives more weight to the final boss, which is typically more of a combat test than anything else. A 1v1 fight with Ganondorf is a lot more appealing when you haven't really had a chance to go toe-to-toe with any other enemy in the game.

I've observed that throughout gaming history, there's always a constant controversy between these two general arguments regarding gameplay design and difficulty. Did the developers lose their touch with their creativity and/or their audience which resulted to terminal mediocrity? OR Did the audience's personal preference simply change as they get older; outgrowing the intended audience of the game? Keyword: General Depending on which game on which genre on which franchise on which developer on which platform on which demographic, the change on nuance is DRASTIC.

Majora's Mask originally had a bunch of bosses you could take out with numerous different methods _including_ both the transformation mask of the area and the dungeon's tool, but not requiring either necessarily. Remake shoehorned all of the boss fights into following the pattern more strictly, even adding eyeballs to serve as targets to all the bosses because eyeball = shoot with arrow.

This man woke up and chose violence

Man, Yeah, BOTW really deviated from the normal pattern by making them all boring... Early bosses are always going to be a problem of course, but I think the best way to fix Zelda bosses is to make their AI more reactive to you finding weaknesses. Obviously making the boss a test of the dungeon's skills is important, and having the boss have weaknesses to those skills is great, but have skills from previous dungeons in there too and as you exploit a weakness update a matrix so they make that mistake less often. If you're fighting a Hinox who's stomping around with a solid helmet you can wait for it to take it's helmet off to shoot it in the eye, but each time you do so it will take it's helmet off less often, so you'll also have to learn to pick up the giant bombs it uses and throw it back, or tie it's foot with a rope and trip it over. You have to prove an ability to defeat certain moves, but the enemy has more options and relying too much on the most obvious option means they'll eventually stop doing it and you'll be forced to figure out a different puzzle... because ultimately Zelda is a puzzle game, and the swordplay is just not fun enough on it's own to make a good boss fight without puzzle elements.

Knucklemaster in Link Between Worlds did something cool because that dungeon has no designated item. That fight relied purely on exploiting the game's central mechanic of merging into walls. A few bosses in Minish Cap are also centered around the game's central mechanic of shrinking to go into small openings, although the boss from Fortress of Winds still requires the dungeon's item in addition to the shrinking mechanic. Also, the two main antagonists of the Oracle games, Onox and Veran, have really creative fights that use unexpected item combinations rather than the standard sword and light arrows Zelda games seem obsessed with. In the Onox fight, you have to use the rod, which isn't really used in combat anywhere else, to safely swipe away Onox's shield, and then in the second phase you use the cape to jump up to reach the weak point. With Veran, you actually use mystery seeds and the switch hook to separate her from Ambi's or Nayru's body so you can hit her, and the way you figure out the mystery seed trick is actually by paying attention to the plot of the game itself. Speaking of the Oracle games, in Seasons when you fight Medusa Head you actually don't need to use the dungeon item at all and can just beat her up with your sword, but if you do use the dungeon item there's actually a secret trick you can use if you're clever enough. I also recall the Gohma fight in that game being way more complex than any other Gohma fight, with a variety of ways to kill her. The takeaway from all this is that the portable Zelda games need more credit for their awesome boss fights. I can think of a few more examples, but this comment has already gotten pretty long.

6:10 "You see the pattern by now" Yes, we really do. You don't have to spend over three minutes listing examples in this amount of depth. 2, maybe 3 if it were a difficult to understand concept, would have been enough, and then you can just list a few more off by name only, without explaining the individual mechanics of every fight. The video would have a much nicer pace that way. Hopefully this comes off as constructive criticism and not just mean.

My biggest issue with Zelda bosses is that so many of the actions are binary. There is no room for player expression or skilful execution - it's just 'hit X to make Y happen'. The better bosses have more expressive interactions, but there is a critical need for more involved combat mechanics in the boss fighting. Breath of the Wild really opened up the combat space here, giving the player room for skilful execution, but also veered far away from what feels like a Zelda boss. Just like with its dungeon design, the sweet spot is probably somewhere between the two.

Your other videos were written a lot better. Watching this felt like listening to someone just bashing OoT for having lame 1-trick bosses for solid 10 minutes before getting other examples out. That said, I do understand that it can be looked at as quiet boring to have bosses with just one predefined way of overcoming them but on the other hand, the complete lack of special feeling weaknesses of BotW bosses made them even more bland to me (speaking of the 4 divine beasts & ganon). Continuing this thought, the total number of zelda bosses that felt like a change of pace, that stood out from the rest of their games, can be counted on one hand for me... However bosses feel rarely special in any game.

12:00 Oracle of Seasons would like to have a word with you

I would say Twilight Princess is the main culprit for this. I think Majora's Mask does a good job at going back to the style of A Link to the Past. Also, I feel like the comparison of Gohma and King Dodongo is a little oversimplified. If you haven't played all the Zelda games where you need to feed bombs to big lizards then it's a decently interesting puzzle, and I would say all the child dungeons in OoT are just an extended tutorial, hence why the change for Phatom Ganon makes sense. And personally, while they aren't overly complicated, I feel like most of the bosses in Zelda have enough nuance like you talked about that they're still engaging even if they're easy (even TP has its moments). While BotW was great in how flexible the bosses were, I felt like the Ganons and Lynels were just variations on the same fight. The Taluses and Hinox were very creative though, even if they got to be overly easy. Overall you make good points on boss design, good video.

The Zelda-triangle doesn't really allow for much risk-reward either since you're locked into using dungeon-item and sword. Games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta have a fun risk-reward. Sure, you're pretty safe when you fire your guns from a distance but the damage is comparatively pathetic compared to melee. Getting close to the enemies to whack them with your melee attacks is much more rewarding but requires you to risk receiving more damage if you fail to dodge in time. The flow of their attacks also feel more smooth than Link's, since they have techniques that changes the way they move and initiate attacks. Zelda items could add to Link's general movement. Like Roc's Feather making Link jump 2 meters in the air, pegasus boots making Link blink 2 meters ahead, pegasus seeds increasing Link's movement speed. Power Bracelet allowing Link to block stronger attacks but it slows down the rate at which he attacks. Heck, the hookshot can be used to initiate melee attacks from afar (the downside being the slow travel time). Just ideas. Also, fun bosses: The mini boss from the pirate ship in Skyward Sword. Ghirahim from Skyward Sword. Dark Link from OoT since its health scales with the player and there are multiple ways to beat it.

I really wish you talked about all of the original Majora's Mask bosses.

Bloodborne is probably the best boss design I've seen. It rests a lot on it's good combat system, but there's so much more to it then that. Almost every boss in the game (with the exception of about maybe 2, Rom and the witches) acts very lively and unpredictable, has fairly predictable weaknesses, (Beasts are weak to fire and serrated, for example) with no consistent or expected path to victory. Most have multiple phases designed specifically to counter strategies used on the the first half of the fight. Everyone has at least one boss that just gets their goat, and it's always a different one.

I might be in the minority, but I don’t see any issues with the Zelda pattern. Still have fun with it and there’s more to a game than just the boss fights, so the quick puzzle battle works well.