(Initial post is going to contain spoilers for Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 7, and extremely light spoilers for FF7 Remake)
I was having a discussion with a friend recently where we were debating the merits of fighting a final boss as only a final boss.
The impetus for this discussion was Final Fantasy 7 and its recent remakes. Basically, in Final Fantasy 7, you only fight Sephiroth as part of the absolute last boss sequence in the story, complete with "regular" Sephiroth being the absolute last opponent. In the recent Final Fantasy 7 Remake titles, we are still presumably following the same basic story as Final Fantasy 7, but Sephiroth has already been fought in multiple forms well before the finale. If we are assuming Sephiroth to be the finale of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Story (which is a fair assumption, one way or another), it will be a Sephiroth that you know you have defeated in combat before, even if he scurried off after those battles to fight again. But on the other hand, a potential Final Sephiroth could prove just how far you have come as a character/fighter with an even more scary/powerful form. Would a Sephiroth finale be a perfect measuring stick of how far you have come, or a simple bout against some dude you already know you can beat?
Compare this to Final Fantasy 6, where final boss Kefka is fought once in the battle system at maybe the 30% mark in the game, is fought "in cinema" at the 50% mark, and then encountered as the final-final boss at the end. Here, you see a clear throughline of Kefka going from "magic knight" to "god emperor", and even just getting to him at the end is a little more complicated than running into him on a snowfield. And I note the "cinema" battle where Celes stabs Kefka on the Floating Island, as that sets up the tragedy of if she had just killed "the man" there, she would would have saved the world from unspeakable suffering at the hands of "the god" later. But she (and, arguably, the player) couldn't pull it off, so Kefka became more than a little powerful. Your final boss just got an upgrade, and you will have to fight that.
So anywho, those are some examples, so here's the question:
Do you think final bosses should only be fought as a final threat, or should there be multiple battles with them throughout the game?
I was having a discussion with a friend recently where we were debating the merits of fighting a final boss as only a final boss.
The impetus for this discussion was Final Fantasy 7 and its recent remakes. Basically, in Final Fantasy 7, you only fight Sephiroth as part of the absolute last boss sequence in the story, complete with "regular" Sephiroth being the absolute last opponent. In the recent Final Fantasy 7 Remake titles, we are still presumably following the same basic story as Final Fantasy 7, but Sephiroth has already been fought in multiple forms well before the finale. If we are assuming Sephiroth to be the finale of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Story (which is a fair assumption, one way or another), it will be a Sephiroth that you know you have defeated in combat before, even if he scurried off after those battles to fight again. But on the other hand, a potential Final Sephiroth could prove just how far you have come as a character/fighter with an even more scary/powerful form. Would a Sephiroth finale be a perfect measuring stick of how far you have come, or a simple bout against some dude you already know you can beat?
Compare this to Final Fantasy 6, where final boss Kefka is fought once in the battle system at maybe the 30% mark in the game, is fought "in cinema" at the 50% mark, and then encountered as the final-final boss at the end. Here, you see a clear throughline of Kefka going from "magic knight" to "god emperor", and even just getting to him at the end is a little more complicated than running into him on a snowfield. And I note the "cinema" battle where Celes stabs Kefka on the Floating Island, as that sets up the tragedy of if she had just killed "the man" there, she would would have saved the world from unspeakable suffering at the hands of "the god" later. But she (and, arguably, the player) couldn't pull it off, so Kefka became more than a little powerful. Your final boss just got an upgrade, and you will have to fight that.
So anywho, those are some examples, so here's the question:
Do you think final bosses should only be fought as a final threat, or should there be multiple battles with them throughout the game?