It took me over 25 attempts to beat Esther Winchester, a wild western cow riding what could best be described as a saloon cart, In Cuphead: The last delicious course. A few dozen sessions of tireless repetition, hyper-focus, slow and steady mastery of rhythms and colorful attacks thrown my way. Gradually, I knew she had a pause after she threw a giant cactus at me, so no I drop that flying dog, it will eventually release a little bit of cactus that I can dodge, so in its third stage (when it turns into an anthropomorphic mass of sausage strung together) the key is to dodge up and down Much.
The steady, clean (but intense and frantic) flow of information I absorb every time I fight and fail against this and every other boss in the Cuphead DLC means that even across dozens of deaths, these beautiful battles never get boring.
There was a lot of complaints about developer StudioMDHR’s decision years ago to transform Cuphead from a side-scrolling shooter to what is now essentially a Boss Rush game, but that decision helped it become a beacon for a grueling, fair boss design.
Something I wrote in my review of Cuphead DLC is that once you find its beat, you become “part of the machine”; Your understanding of each of the movements, even when they begin to interfere with each other and come to you all at once, makes you so in tune with them that you merge with this monster trying to destroy you. The thing that helps get to this state is that every battle takes place on a single screen, and your eyes are naturally drawn to every beautifully drawn element coming towards you. Each element is visually distinct, and stays clear even amidst all the clutter.
Once you reach this state, the game truly It becomes a spectacle for the spectator to see, but as a player you hardly see anything; Your eyes somehow focus on four things at once and yet none of them are separate as you finally begin to solve the challenge in front of you at the twenty-fifth time of the question.
You The Matrix’s Neo Once he starts seeing a duo, you’re a Game of Thrones clairvoyant Bran with his eyes rolling to the back of his head – invisible but seeing everything at the same time. Then you hear the game announcer shout “It’s a knockout!” , back to reality.
Another series best known for its peak fights is Software’s Soulsborne series, along with the latest Elden Ring. Historically, the series has had some of the best boss designs, rewarding patience players who take the time to read the boss’s moves, as well as those who have the guts to exploit the openings that pop up. Elden Ring seems to continue this design philosophy through its inception, with challenging but controllable fights in the likes of Godrick the Grafted, Margit, and Rennala. But in the later stages of the game, combat becomes a chore, escalating in difficulty at the expense of clarity, satisfying tempo, well, cheerful.
The seemingly endless flashes and self-healing of Malinia, the zone-of-effect attacks and the explosive attacks of Godfrey and the Elden monster, the unqualified mayhem of the parties being the grafted ones – things get chaotic, and confrontations start to feel like battles of attrition across multiple deaths. Surely, the average player will get there In the endBut would it really feel like an accomplishment if it took you 50 tries to do it?
So you go online, browse through dozens of posts by fellow players asking for help, and discover that in fact the Godskin Apostle can easily be put to sleep, or that Malenia can deteriorate – you just have to go to Rennala and re-spec as a strength-builder – or that Mimic Tear is a great decoy for every boss fight. But this whole process – from quests to breaks to mysterious in-game items – gets you far from mere Universe in combat.
The same goes for calling players for your help which, while welcome, seems to depend on the AI boss who doesn’t really know what to do when faced with more than one player. The magic of fencing is lost when you have to engage in the hard work of optimizing construction, online research, and inventory management.
At Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course, I never once despaired, held my breath, or sought help online. Boss fights take me back to the basic Cuphead game as a start, but with their crisp boss styles and elegant rhythm, they also remember the great duels from FromSoft games – Knight Artorias from Dark Souls and Gascoigne and Gehrman from Bloodborne, the challenging but perfectly weighted ‘Big slow laps’ game side by side With the quick little crook from Ornstein & Smough…
All the information you need in Cuphead boss battles is right on your screen, and your ability to conquer these battles is distributed between your mind and your fingertips on the console. ‘Git gud’ gets a bad reputation, but in Cuphead – as in the old FromSoft games – it applies in a healthy way. Yes, you need to keep trying and trying and yes, you need to do that shit over and over, but you’ll get there sooner rather than later, and once you do, you’ll feel unbelievable. It’s not an easy ride, and these games are certainly not for everyone, but for those in their favour, the reward justifies the ordeal.
In the Elden Ring, meanwhile, “Git gud” can’t be done so much as “cycling through your inventory and reading on Reddit to learn the right combination of weapon arts, tactics, items, and builds to defeat this particular boss.” Yes, you will always have people on Reddit saying things like “I defeated Godfrey for the first time, armed only with a poke of fire and completely naked save for a pillow wrapped around my head,” But most of us have neither the time nor the gaming physiology for that.
Honestly, it would be tiring either to bang your head against your boss for two whole evenings, or to plow through your inventory in search of ‘that one item’ capable of getting them to their knees, or to cycle through your weapon arts to see if that boss is more susceptible to damage. Frost or Bleed.
Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course I was able to distill the design of a great boss into something mechanically simple and communicatively straightforward. It’s not easy, but the constant sense of progress you give with each run (marked by a bar that shows how close you are to the finish line after each death) motivates you to keep going.
Many of these ideas are not revolutionary. They’re actually really old school, going back to the days of Contra, arcade schmups, and earlier Castlevania game bosses. This is something From Software used to be their masters, but they seem to have lost their way lately, and may need to play a certain old cartoon shooter game to rediscover the old boss battle magic.
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