I just beat Breath of the Wild, finally, and it is one of my favorite games of all time. I loved the art style, the sense of exploration, the way the game is built out of (mostly) predictable and consistent systems (Goddamn did I hate the Yiga cave, though), and the world of Hyrule.

That being said...did anyone else think the bosses were all kind of bad? "Shoot him in the eye" is the best strategy for the majority of the bosses, and they really do a good job of exposing the flaws in BOTW's camera and at time finicky controls.

Zelda games basically invented the idea of the boss that you have to take down by mastering specific game mechanics or equipment. This game couldn't quite do that because it was more open-ended, but the way they got around that seems to have been by making small nods to unique boss fight mechanics while mostly focusing on generic strategies like shooting a boss in the eye, using stasis, or perfect dodges/parries. They all feel like the same boss with a little bit of "wind" or "fire" flavor added, rather than unique, interesting, challenging, encounters.

They all look pretty similar too, formless black liquid things, with the exception of Calamity Ganon who looks great.

Here's my take on each boss:

Waterblight Ganon: This fight is...okay. You need to use cryosis, which is good because at least there's an interesting mechanic, but it's really just window dressing on a bog standard "shoot the boss in the eye" fight. Grade: B.

Thunderblight Ganon: This guy is annoying because he teleports right behind you, though once you learn how to deal with him it becomes less frustrating and more just irritating. The part with the metal rods is clever and cool. But in general this boss was hard for me to keep track of and at times hard for me to attack because he spent so much time in the air. Well, I COULD shoot him the eye. That worked okay. Grade: C+

Fireblight Ganon: His fireball attack is easy to avoid. Having to throw a bomb at him when he sucks in air for it is...ok...but otherwise it's just more eye shooting/stasis action. Not really interesting or engaging. Would have been much better if we had to use bombs to knock down pillars or something rather than just tossing them into a suction area. Grade: B-

Windblight Ganon: Pretty easy, with no specific interesting strategies other than to use the updrafts, which can be finicky and are unnecessary anyway. Super generic. Grade: C-

Calamity Ganon: He's slow enough to avoid, and so just a disappointment because he's not challenging...until he becomes invincible. Apparently you're supposed to perfect/block or perfect dodge him, which is a mechanic I'd forgotten about by the time I got to him, but you can just use the Goron block to reflect his beam back at him. This boss fight was literally just me avoiding him for long enough to recharge my ability then reflecting his beam back and finishing him with Urbosa's fury. Truly awful. There should have been a hint tip about using perfect timing or something. Even with that, shoehorning in a specific mechanic you haven't emphasized to that point is just a dumb way to finish a game that's been all about choices and interacting systems. Also, why do Ganon's fire attacks create an updraft if you aren't supposed to use it? This whole fight is an unfocused mess. Calamnity Ganon looks cool and has a good variety of attacks in theory, but in the end the encounter is both easy and hard to decipher, not an ideal combo. Grade: D+

Dark Beast Ganon: Then it gets worse. I almost never rode a horse in BOTW but even if I had, just randomly handing me one to slowly gallop around a guy who...barely attacks...and shoot glowing spots with a magical bow that comes from nowhere (what happened to the SWORD that seals the Darkness? We hear about it for the whole game then we use a bow?) Just horrible. The only upsides are that it is super, duper, easy and the ending where you jump in the air and shoot the eye looks cool and is a good call back. Grade: D-

None of Breath of the Wild's bosses were particularly fun to fight or interesting. If you want to include the divine beast "entry" fights then I'd say that Vah Ruta was kind of interesting (B+), Vah Naboris and Vah Medoh were boring and simple (C-) and Vah Rudania was a good sequence but not really a boss fight (N/A).

World bosses I fought: Hynox were really cool looking and had a neat gimmick based on the myth of the cyclops (though it's the SAME shoot the eye gimmick as everyone else. (B+) Lynel are challenging but they just have too much health. I had to kill 2 of them on the way to Ganon (Yes I know they CAN be avoided) and it was truly annoying. to have to keep whacking away at them and using stasis to manage their charges. I think they're decent as top-end creatures in the world, but seeing as they are tougher than Ganon it was weird to put two in the path to him. (B+, though only as optional high-end content.)

ETA: I forgot about the Talus which were fine, if a bit simple (B) and, as detailed below, Master Kohga (B+)

yeah, this and the music are the two weak points for me about this game (and the bland dungeons). It's so weird to enjoy a zelda game that completely misses on the core zelda concepts they decided to include, maybe they should just cut it out and replace it with something else for the sequel.

I suppose they weren't incredible, but I thought they were well-designed and a lot of fun.

Oh, you were supposed to throw a bomb at the fire dude? I wound up using the lightning bolt ability to beat him because I couldn't figure out what to do, and never even considered using bombs since no other enemy/combat encounter in the game required me to use bombs. I did the same thing for the final boss when he went invincible.

Also, I'm probably the only guy who actually died to the darkbeast Ganon, since every time I jumped into the air to shoot the final weak point, Zelda would say "now's your chance!" before the eye or whatever was fully revealed, so I'd go into aiming mode and the weak spot would hide and go invulnerable again. Really left that game on a sour note after that.

There was also that other boss that was the leader of the evil cult or whatever it was. That one was kinda fun, but I still have no idea what was up with those guys.

The sequences to unlock the dungeons were more epic and fun than the duengeon bosses for sure.

The bomb thing is the sort of lateral thinking that Zelda games often employ. It sort of makes sense if you think about it (he sucks everything around him into himself) but you're right that it's not super apparent and bombs in that game do so little damage that you don't really think of them as effective weapons. I basically figured it out after some time when I was like "Stasis doesn't work, magnesis doesn't work, cryosis doesn't work, what's left?"

How did you die to Darkbeast Ganon? I'm not trying to make fun of you, we've all had game sequences where it just didn't click for us for whatever reason. I just feel like he literally barely attacked, and his attacks were easy to avoid. i could have fought him indefinitely because he didn't even seem that interested in Link. He just felt like a target that stood in place waiting to die, shooting out one telegraphed energy beam every 45 seconds.

I did forget about Master Kohga. That boss fight was okay, though surrounded by my least favorite parts of the game. I hated the Yiga cave because I don't like stealth (or instadeath) and it broke the rules that the game set for itself (Mipha's grace and fairies don't work, instakills,) Then after you kill Kohga the Yiga clan appears to annoy you every few minutes, which I did not enjoy. Kohga himself is a solid B+ boss. You have to use stasis and magnesis in interesting ways,.

@bigsocrates: I mentioned how I died in my post. The part where it wants you to shoot an arrow on the final weak point all dramatic like in the middle of the air. If you shoot it before it's COMPELTELY emerged, then it doesn't reveal the weak point and you can't land the final blow. Zelda's voice clip saying some variation of "do it now!" was always before the weak point was actually hittable. I died because I got sick of getting back on the horse to avoid the lazer (at that point I thought I was doing damage to the weak point and just needed to keep firing at it, not realizing it wasn't actually doing any damage).

@teddie: So basically you got frustrated because the instructions were unclear and tried to brute force it. Got it. I've been there multiple times myself in various games. That might have happened to me with Calamity Ganon if I hadn't seen the damage from the reflected shot, so I knew that if I just lasted long enough for the cool down to pop I could at least win that way.

Even that idea was already worn out more than 10 years ago. I agree that the bosses were bad, but bad Zelda bosses are the rule and not the exception by now. Though the homogeneous appearance of the bosses was a new aspect of disappointment.

In my humble-ish opinion, BotW is an incredible game and an achievement in the industry that also leaves a lot to be desired - which in this case isn't a negative to me. It can either help Nintendo make even more great content for the title OR redefine/inspire how others do open world games (it also leaves room for disappointment if none of these things happen). It's just such a wonderful world and after 200+ hours I wish there was more to do or explore. Sadly, as the loading screen says, we've left no stone unturned. Still missing 82 koroks though......

That said the bosses were not very inventive but they were ok.
I did love the mini-dungeons and beasts. My partner however had never played a Zelda game and she loved every second of it, including the bosses, so it was rewarding watching her figure them out and best them.

Pretty much any holdover from "classic" Zelda felt extremely weak. The open world gives you a staggering amount of freedom and presents a massive degree of unpredictability, and then all of the main dungeons completely strip you of almost all of your exploratory abilities and require pretty obvious (and overly repetitious) solutions. They all took me maybe 30 or 45 minutes, and the bosses went down without so much as a hit on me.

Yeah, the bosses kind of stunk and were absurdly easy. I had a much more difficult time with the Lynel, but it wasn't really a fun difficult as you pointed out.

I hate to say it but definitely. Not to mention they are really easy too if you use the Master Sword.

Glad I did a run for Ganon without killing any of them first. I did find the Ganon to be better than you did, but I knew about perfect block. But I knew that because the calamity Ganon fight was basically a remix of the Ganon fight from Ocarina of Time.

My biggest quibble with the bosses though isn't that, it's rather that they weren't unique monsters like Dungeon bosses usually are. I would have loved to see Gohma (or Gleeok or DoDongo etc) like they showed back in 2011

@slag: I admit that not knowing about the perfect block was sort of my fault, both for taking 3 months to finish the game (for various reasons) and for not paying as much attention to the combat specifics as I should have (mostly because the game let me be relatively sloppy with little penalty up until that point. I probably died like 12-15 times total outside Yiga cave instadeaths, where I probably died another 10-15 times.) But even with that I feel like it just wasn't that interesting a fight. I would have preferred more phases or complex mechanics or something.

And even you have to admit that the Dark Beast form is flat out bad. It feels like something out of a 2nd tier PS2 game and it comes totally out of left field. The Master Sword is hyped up as this ultimate weapon throughout the game, only you don't finish Ganon with the Master Sword. You use this magical bow that Zelda manifests out of nowhere and literally shoot glowing spots like it's a fricking parody game.

I know they felt like they needed a second form for the boss because it's an epic Japanese video game, and I assume they felt like they needed the bow because not everyone would even have the Master Sword, but they could have just had Zelda give the Master Sword to any player who didn't have it at that point, and done something, anything, different.

I literally decided to write this post after defeating Dark Beast Ganon and looking for posts on GB complaining about him but being unable to find any. I was shocked nobody else had made a topic about it.

Also, I completely agree with your point that having the bosses be different creatures with distinct visual looks and behaviors would have been much better, and has been done in a lot of Zelda games. I understand why, for thematic story purposes, they felt like all the bosses should be an aspect of Ganon and should be visually tied together, but they could have just been corrupted versions of various creatures just like Ganon corrupted the guardians. A DoDongo with black oozy patches and eyes would be very cool and threatening. Moreso at least than the "floating ring wraith coated in oil" look they went with.

I think the bosses were fine. I fought them early enough to where I didn't have a shit ton of arrows to waste on them and I mostly relied on my sword and movement skills. When your more restricted the battles can feel a lot more tense and rewarding. I can agree that maybe they were a bit too easy but that doesn't mean bad to me.

@bigsocrates:I don't think it is your fault at all. I wouldn't have figured out the reflect trick if it wasn't such a common Zelda series Boss mechanic trope. I 100% think the game could have communicated that better. If nothing else by making perfect block more useful in other parts of the game. I didn't really shield surf much either, despite thinking that was a really rad mechanic.

I think you have a valid complaint about the Dark Beast form about how it handled the lore of the Master Sword, that being said truthfully didn't really bother me as I was having too much fun. Like I said it felt felt really similar to the second stage of the Ocarina of Time Ganon fight (Zelda seals ganon, you hit him and she zaps him with an arrow), so I dunno it just felt like a Ganon fight to me. That second phase wasn't hard by any means, kinda reminded me of a Quicktime event in some ways. I did like gusting up into the air to blast him for the killing blow.

I think though that was a sacrifice they had to make due to the game's open ended design which allowed you to bypass big chunks of the content if you wanted to (and by consequence health and weapons). E.g. I fought Ganon without the Master Sword or defeating any of the guardians (just to see if I could) and personally I would have been pissed if I couldn't win the fight without the Master Sword. I didn't feel cheated though after basically defeating 5 forms (4 blights+ Calamity ganon) before that. I nearly ran out of weapons.

Since the original Zelda game and OoT had an emphasis on a light arrow you needed to damage Ganon, I felt like the Sacred Bow made enough sense in the lore of the series that it didn't feel out of place. Definitely agree it could have been better, you are probably right in that they probably should have found some narrative contrivance to involve the Master Sword in the fight somehow (maybe even give you a bad ending for not using it?). Or bare minimum acknowledged that you didn't have it.

But for me at least, after 13 years of not really being sucked in by a Zelda game, I am willing to give them a pass for recycling some old boss fight elements and tropes. It's been long enough for me, that I just enjoyed having a new one of those fights again.

But I don't blame you for not feeling the same way. You've got fair reasons for it imo.