Boss phases are overrated

written 2026-05-08

Many action game boss fights have multiple phases, where, after reducing the boss's hp to a certain threshold, its attack patterns change. Let's consider the potential reasons to design a boss like this, and the potential reasons not to.

When listening to others' thoughts on this, there's mainly one claimed pro I've heard:

Boss fights are usually meant to last a while, and if they're doing the same few attacks the whole time, it could feel repetitive.

But I think that's not a pro of phases. That's a pro of big movesets. Rabi-Ribi has bosses with huge movesets and, as far as I could tell, for the most part no phases. I never felt those bosses were repetitive, and I've never heard anyone else complain such either.

So I think there's only one real pro:

To provide a better learning curve: have the boss start with easier versions of its attacks and progress to more advanced versions after the player's had a chance to get used to them. This can create great first-time play experiences, letting the player win on their first try while still feeling the joy of gradually getting better at something and ultimately mastering something hard. Undertale does this.

And, as the title suggets, I think there's at least one con too:

Since the player has to beat the first phase every time just to get some practice at the next one, they experience the first phase way more, which can lead to it becoming easy and repetitive.

The implementation can mitigate or exacerbate these points. Let's look at a few examples:

Hollow Knight: most bosses don't actually have phases, but those that do are pretty textbook examples of the above points. Later phases usually keep mostly the same moveset but are harder in some way, so they're good at smoothening the learning curve, but by the time you're getting to them consistently the early phases are probably easy, and because of the healing system, easy phases aren't even interesting to try to minimize damage on because you can likely keep full health thru them even if you get hit a few times.

Cuphead: phases often have little or nothing in common, so they're effectively separate bosses stuck together. This defeats the main pro and exacerbates the main con. Especially bad when many Cuphead attacks are poorly telegraphed so they take trial and error to figure out.

Last Command: phases do have different movesets, but usually build on previous ones, like the first 3 phases introduce different attacks in isolation and the next 3 combine 2 of them at a time and the last one has all 3 at once. Achieves the pro well, and the continue system mitigates the con by letting you get up to 4 tries at a late phase for each time you replay the early ones.