The Superboss Problem

Spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver, and Pokemon Sword/Shield ahead

You’ve done it. You’ve beaten the greatest enemy in the game. Ruby Weapon, Simon, Caroline and Justine, you’ve done it. You are at the top of the world. And now, you have to go face the final boss that you’ve spent an entire game building up to only to curb stomp them because you got so over-leveled to beat the Super Boss. Feels a little anti-climactic to be honest.

This brings us to a pair of issues I have found exist in games with an experience based leveling system, a pair I’ve decided to dub “The Superboss Problem.” They are as follows

1. The presence of a Superboss, specifically one available to fight before the Final Boss has been defeated, will drive players to overlevel to fight this boss, therefore devaluing the combat with the Final Boss.
2. The drive to level up through attaining experience by defeating enemies will cause players to seek out combat over any other aspect of the game, to the point where they will deliberately solve puzzles wrong if it can ensure more fights.

A quick definition for those unfamiliar: A Superboss is an enemy npc that is considerably more powerful than any other enemy in the game, including the final boss. They are usually an optional combat available to the player, offering immense rewards if they are beaten. The practice, to my knowledge, originates with the Final Fantasy game series, but can be found throughout numerous games nowadays, especially JRPGs. Some examples include Ruby and Emerald Weapon from Final Fantasy VII, Simon and Osquio from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Red from Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver, or Caroline and Justine/Lavenza from Persona 5/Persona 5 Royal. Outside of JRPGs you can find the concept in some other games, though it becomes a bit muddier: The Nameless King from Dark Souls III, Malenia, Blade of Miquella from Elden Ring, and Sigrun from God of War are maybe some of the best examples outside the JRPG world.

Notably, in the case of every example there except for Red, these bosses are available to fight prior to beating the final boss. In fact, in the case of Caroline and Justine/Lavenza you have to beat them before facing the final boss (albeit only in New Game + so you both have to have beaten the final boss and can’t have beaten the final boss yet). This is the cause for the first part of the Superboss problem: By presenting this goal to the player, the player is now encouraged to level up to fight this Superboss. Once they have beaten them, they will now be incredibly over-leveled compared to every other enemy in the game. This includes the Final Boss who they have yet to fight., rendering what is meant to be a climactic final battle into a trivial stompfest. Fighting Renoir when overleveled is quite frankly, comical. Even if you increase his health, he just can’t do enough damage to be a threat.

Of course, many of these games do allow you to continue playing after beating the final boss. Knowing this, you might ask why not just fight the final boss at an appropriate level and then go fight the superboss? To which I say, how dare you. Look, when I’m playing a game, I want the final boss to be the last thing I do. I want to beat Renoir, destroy the canvas, watch the credits roll, and turn the game off with a sense of accomplishment. What I don’t want is to experience a heart wrenching finale and witness the end of the world and then go “Ok, pretend none of that happened, now go grind levels for hours to fight another boss.” Plus, in some cases, beating the Super boss will give new plot information! Fighting Simon and Osquio adds some very interesting character lore/depth for Verso, and I don’t want to lose out on that just so Renoir can be scary!

The only time such a thing is acceptable to me is when there is an actual story post-game, something Pokemon actually does quite well. Whether it's hunting the seven sages in Pokemon Black and White, dealing with Swordward and Shieldbert in Pokemon Sword and Shield or going to Kanto in Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver, they create a story for you to experience after beating the main game. This presents a much more cohesive lead up to the eventual superboss of Red, where you don’t need to ignore the ending sequence of the game and pretend it just didn’t happen.

However, where I believe Pokemon fails in regards to the Superboss problem is point 2: That these games, in only rewarding the player experience when they win a combat encounter, devalue the various puzzles they put in their games. Think of it: You’re in the Ghost Gym from Diamond and Pearl. You’ve realized that solving the math problems on the doors is pretty easy, and you can get through this gym without having to fight any of the trainers behind the wrong answer doors. However, you also realize that fighting trainers is a far more efficient way of leveling up than fighting wild pokemon, and if you just beat Fantina then you won’t get to fight these trainers. So, you deliberately fail the puzzle so as to better level up your pokemon for the challenges ahead.

Pokemon is not the only perpetrator here though. You can see a similar pattern play out in Persona 5’s Sayuri puzzle in Madarame’s palace. The game punishes failure by giving you combat, but combat is the only way to gain experience, so you are in a way encouraged to fail. There’s no real benefit to going through without failing either. Neither of these games have incredibly punishing resource management. Hell in Pokemon you can just leave, heal, and come back and nothing will have changed, so you’re not really saving yourself much except time. Even when the puzzles are intriguing and cool to solve, it feels like it’s more efficient and effective to just brute force, take every wrong turn, and fight everything rather than do the puzzle.

All of this being said, I do believe there are solutions to this Superboss problem. In regards to the existence of the Superboss and its inherent devaluation of the Final Boss fight, I have two: One is to follow the Pokemon strategy, and have the Superboss be part of the postgame, only accessible after the Final Boss has been fought. This way, you are a lot less likely to outstrip the power of the Final Boss too excessively and the fight can feel satisfactory climactic. However, there are situations where that won’t work. 

Expedition 33, as I mentioned earlier, can end with the canvas being destroyed. There is no logical post game here. In cases like this, I would argue for the use of Difficulty Scaling: making the game's difficulty rise in relation to the player's level. It doesn’t need to be mandatory, I understand that for some people roflstomping the final boss is their thing, but for people like me, I believe this is the solution. Expedition 33 tries it a bit with the ability to limit your own damage or increase the enemies health, but it forgets to actually make the enemies hit harder in any way. But, if you could properly implement this, you can create a system that allows for a powerful optional Superboss, and still enables a suitably challenging Final Boss that can match your power level.

 You can also just go the Soulslike route and make everything tough as nails regardless, or the Blasphemous and Hollow Knight route where defeating the hard bosses enables an even harder true final boss, but those are a bit more suited for other game styles.

Now in regards to the rewarding of simple brute force and devaluing of actual engagement with puzzles and mechanics, I present the case of Baldur's Gate 3: give experience as a reward for non-combat solutions as well. Baldur’s Gate 3 allows players to gain experience for successfully avoiding combat via clever dialogue and strategic choices, rewarding players for more than just fighting. Now you are encouraged to avoid combat through more than just resource management, and you can actually get stronger even as you don’t fight. I think a lot of games could learn from this. The fact is, I want to engage with the puzzles of games! They’re fun! I like figuring them out. Likewise, I enjoy that combat is the punishment for failing them, cuz I like fighting, and you don’t want failure to be too discouraging. I just don’t want to feel like I’m somehow losing overall even when I solve the puzzle correctly.

If I’m being entirely honest, a lot of this could be avoided by me just being less particular about how I like to play games but also, this is my blog so I’ll do what I want. I don’t like the feeling in a game that I’m missing out on something because of playing well. Whether it’s losing out on rewards from combats because I can successfully navigate around them, or losing out on an emotionally and mentally stimulating end combat because I wanted to do everything in the game before beating it, it almost feels like you’re being punished for playing the game well and to its full extent. I don’t want to experience plot points out of order (unless that’s structural in which case god speed), I don’t want to deliberately fail puzzles so I can reap the more important rewards, and I don’t want to fight an enemy that’s been hyped up all game only to find that I outleveled and outpowered them ten hours ago. I just want to feel like when I do my best, the best is what will follow. It’s not how the real world always goes, but it would be nice if the fake ones made up for it.