I\’ve been putting time into Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition as part of my attempt to clear my backlog (so I can get some new games). I\’m near the end of the game on Normal mode, and one thing has cropped up that has me a little confused. Namely, why the developer is making me re-fight old boss battles.

Mission 18 has you wander through a maze worthy of Escher, fighting bosses that you fought previously in the game. You don\’t have to fight all of them (although you do get a blue orb fragment if you do). However all of these bosses aren\’t any more challenging than the first time you fought them, and indeed don\’t exhibit any new attack patterns or moves that you need to deal with.

It\’s far from the only game that does this, though – the original Devil May Cry does this as well, in spite of already making you fight the Phantom, the Griffon and Nero Angelo multiple times each (although to be fair, they do have new attacks with every successive encounter). Okami does this too, making you fight all the major bosses before you can proceed to the endgame (and since your character has obviously gotten a lot stronger since you last fought them, they roll over and die pretty easily). And of course, one of the main complaints about Devil May Cry 4 is how it makes you backtrack as Dante to fight the same bosses again, and then has you fight them all again as Nero at the end of the game.

If anything this smacks of laziness in game development. It\’s not a Capcom-exclusive thing, either – Dimps made you fight every single boss again at the end of Sonic Advance 2. Are game developers just too lazy to think of new ways to challenge the player near the end of the game?

6 thoughts on “I don\’t know why game designers keep doing this”
  1. I get what you’re saying but ya know.. I really loved refighting all the bosses on Mission 18. I liked that you had to come up with your own strategy to the order in which you fought them to make best use of the limited health replenishes available.

    Oh and I loved the chess board battle that precedes!

    Of course, I really was a masochist when it came to DMC3:SE. Playing on hard with Dante while refusing to continue or use any items might not make me the best judge of DMC3 ‘fun’

    1. Yeah, I actually thought the chess board battle was kind of neat, if a bit of a clusterfuck at times. It’s kind of weird that so many people seem to hate that.

      I guess my main problem with recycling boss fights without any change is that the game has already “trained” you how to beat these bosses, so making you fight them again significantly reduces the level of challenge the game offers.

  2. Actually this happens in DMC 4 as well (one of my friends beat it and I was watching him play), but instead of fighting them with Nero again you fight those bosses with Dante.

    So it’s a different ballgame, just that it’s in the same court.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *