SNK Bosses

Be aware that the following may contain spoilers for certain games. Read at your own risk.

We are all familiar with bosses in video games. They stand in the way of the character’s path and represent huge threats that need to be brought down. They can range from many shapes and sizes, from tiny critters to giant colossi. You have bosses that are easy to deal with, and others that while challenging, but fun to fight.

And then you have bosses that are absolute nightmares to fight, removing all the fun aspects you have had and can take hours to beat.

Capcom felt that Akuma wasn’t already a difficult SNK Boss in his inclusion in Street Fighter II, and thus brought in this monster known as Shin Akuma into Street Fighter Alpha. Source: Capcom vs. SNK 2.

Enter the SNK Bosses, the most dangerous type of boss you could fight against in any game. They are most common in fighting games serving as the final boss, but they have made appearances in other game genres. These bosses take the challenging aspect of the game you’re playing and crank it up to such an absurd level that you can’t help but feel like they’re cheating to beat you… which they definitely are.

Such advantages that SNK Bosses will have include:

• Being able to only block one way to avoid damage instead of a high and low block that everyone else needs.

• Super meters that will recharge on their own, and very fast too, allowing them to unleash more powerful attacks, or having no meter and being able to use them any time they want.

• Attacks that have massive priority and armour frames, negating all of yours and dealing 2/3’s of your health in one blow or instantly killing you.

• Having three times the health and unable to be staggered by your attacks.

The list goes on…

SNK Bosses were created during the days of arcade machines where their absurd difficulty was used to separate players from their pocket change, and providing those who do beat them a spot in the High Scores table. The origin of these bosses came from the company SNK, in the form of Rugal Bernstein from The King of Fighters ‘94. Since his creation, many fighting games have since added these kinds of bosses in their own games, with the difficulty only getting harder with every new one that’s made.

Originating from The King of Fighters 1994, Rugal Bernstein is THE first SNK Boss ever made surprising players with his absurd difficulty, and set in stone a long history of other very difficult SNK Bosses since then. Source: The King of Fighters 1994.

This has also caused other companies like Capcom and Arc System Works to follow SNK’s example, creating their own SNK Bosses in their games that manage to be just as terrifying if not more so. An example on Capcom’s side is Shin Akuma from the Street Fighter series, who very quickly gained infamy for his difficulty and ridiculous damage. Another example is Justice from Arc System Works’ Guilty Gear series, whose massive size and zoning attacks (characters who attack from afar) that can reach all the way across the screen have made her a nightmare to fight.

Justice is the first and most iconic SNK Boss made by Arc System Works, and she very quickly showed the world how ridiculous it was to fight her. Source: Guilty Gear XX.

You might be wondering why these kinds of bosses exist if they provide such a massive difficulty curve. The easiest answer for that is story purposes. These characters are often talked about in their respective games as being both powerful and terrifying and encounters against them will prove to players that such fear and hype is well deserving.

They aren’t just locked down to fighting games. Any games with a competitive nature and balance can also have these bosses as opponents. An example would be for racing games where the champion might have a car that is completely tricked out and knowledge of the whole course that gives them an advantage over you, regardless of what vehicle you choose.

Note that not all bosses that are super difficult are considered SNK Bosses. As stated above, only in games with a competitive nature will these bosses exist. In any other game genres like Role-Playing Games, the absurdly difficult bosses would instead be referred to as Superbosses, and that is a different list entirely.

Despite the difficulty of fighting Lingering Will in his fight, he is not an SNK Boss and instead referred to as a Superboss. Source: Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix.

So now you are a bit more familiar with this term and what it entails. Since the inclusion of Rugal in The King of Fighter series, many game companies have added their own SNK Boss into their games. For a majority of these bosses, they have tried to raise the difficulty for each one in every new game iteration. While some have lowered the difficulty to give players, especially newcomers of the genre, a chance to fight them, there is no denying that their creation has changed the fighting game genre.

Kyle Bacon

Kyle Bacon is a student at Algonquin with a passion for creative writing and video games. A quiet individual, but once you bring up a topic he likes, he will spend hours discussing it with you.

Bag of Spilling

Imagine this scenario. You’re playing through a game, going from level to level fighting against enemies with all the weapons you have on your character. You reach a certain point in the game, ready to face the next challenge…

Except all of your weapons are gone. All that time you spent searching every corner of the levels you’ve gone through to find them, all the ammo for those weapons. Everything is just gone except for either your fists or what you had when you started the game.

This is known as Bag of Spilling, and it’s a common trope in gaming that is just as irritating as it sounds. One of the most well known rules when it comes to gaming is that items and experience levels are never carried over to sequels, regardless of how much time has passed. In terms of direct sequels, this makes no sense, but the general explanation is that it’s meant to present a fair challenge to the player.

Imagine all those dice blocks as the weapons and upgrades you spent tirelessly collecting in the game, only for them to all go away in the sequel.

While this is usually accepted, there are some games that provide weak explanations or outright refuse to share anything, leaving you wondering how this character went from being a legitimate badass to a complete rookie in the span of a few months. Were they on vacation and didn’t bother to bring their stuff with them because it wasn’t needed? Were they out of shape because it’s been months or years since the world was saved? Was their stuff stolen through physical or magical means? Regardless of the reason, the results wind up being the same thing.

Metroid is a well known example of a series where you are constantly suffering from Bag of Spilling in each game. It doesn’t matter how many upgrades you get for your Power Suit, or how many missiles or bombs you collect to destroy your enemies faster. The moment you start the next game of the series, everything you had gone out of your way to collect disappears. While they at least try to justify a reason for you losing everything at the start, only a few games in the series actually give you a proper explanation while everything else is just shoehorned in without question

In terms of the timeline, Super Metroid takes place at least a few weeks after Metroid 2. So how did Samus, renowned bounty hunter of the galaxy, lose all her gear in that amount of time? Pictued Above: Metroid: Samus Returns (Metroid 2) (Left), Super Metroid (Right).

While The Legend of Zelda series could be considered another example, it’s ends up forgoing the trope for a different reason, in that each game is set in a different point of time, usually generations or centuries apart. This means that the Link you play as is a completely separate Link from the past games.

With the exception of at least a couple, every game in the Zelda series has a completely different Link you play as, thus rendering the trope mute. Pictured: Zelda Timeline from the Hyrule Historia.

It doesn’t just have to be sequels that do this. This can also happen in the middle of the game you’re playing. The original Doom released back in 1993, as well as its sequel, are the best early example of this thanks to how they’re structured. The full version of the original Doom consists of four episodes, each one about eight levels long (nine when counting secret levels). Throughout those levels you’ll find a large amount of weapons and ammo to help you fight demons. But once you start the next episode, you’re back to only your fists and your pistol. You could chalk it up to demonic forces at play, but you literally just had them a minute ago. How did you wind up losing them all so quickly? The game never gives you a proper answer, and you’re left with nothing but annoyance as a result.

Have fun collecting these weapons all over again for every new episode. Pictured: The weapons in Doom II.

This can also happen in other genres like Role-Playing Games, where certain events may cause something to happen to your character and they lose all the stuff they have on them. This is usually done in the form of death, being thrown into jail, an illness that leaves them out of commission, or just off doing something elsewhere and they lose their stuff as a result. The list goes on, but the results remain the same.

Regardless of what game you play or what genre it’s in, if it gives you the ability to upgrade/level up your character and there’s a sequel, expect it all to be gone. What’s considered a fair challenge by the developers is nothing more than an excuse to just depower a character you had spent so long to strengthen up. Gameplay-wise, it at least makes sense since you would be very overpowered for the next game when you start it. In terms of story, there is none of that.

Kyle Bacon

Kyle Bacon is a student at Algonquin with a passion for creative writing and video games. A quiet individual, but once you bring up a topic he likes, he will spend hours discussing it with you.

Acceptable Breaks From Reality

Let’s take a moment to picture this scenario. You’re currently playing the new First-Person Shooter (FPS) game that’s focusing on the trench warfare of World War I (WWI). You just went through the tutorial and you start playing the first stage, you encounter several enemies and try to shoot at them…

Wait a moment. You just got shot multiple times. How are you still standing and not dead?

You scramble to cover and find tucked in a corner a medpack. You rush over to go grab it… and somehow at the speed of sound you emptied the entire contents of the medpack and healed yourself back to full health, as if you weren’t just shot a whole bunch.

When you’re on the brink of death or just running a fever, grab a health kit and be instantly revitalized. Source: Halo Series.

You find this very weird since the game said it would be a realistic depiction of WWI, so you move on to another game. This new game is a survival game where you need to build and forage in order to survive. You start the game up and…

Wait, how are you building all these structures so quickly with so little materials? How are able to make full course meals with just a few things you had on your hand? How are you able to physically carry all these things you have been picking up without any issue? What is going on?

Think this is an absurd amount to be carrying around? This is one of several pages. Source: Genshin Impact.

These instances you have just experienced are referred to as Acceptable Breaks From Reality, or Breaks for short, and they are more or less essential when making games. There are certain elements of both story and gameplay where realism would make it either tedious, difficult or confusing for the audience. In order to change these elements, there are workarounds that will make them more unrealistic to a blatant point, and no one really minds. There are a number of reasons why they exist, so let’s take a moment to go through the obvious ones.

The main reason is rather obvious. Reality, compared to gaming, is boring. Sure there are a lot of things you can do in real life that can keep you entertained, but for video games it’s a different thing entirely. The main appeal of games is to be in the action right away, to go from point A to point B as quickly as you can or accomplish whatever task it’s telling you to do. You don’t want to be held back because the game is making you wait several hours for it to finish cooking that pot of roast you were making.

Just grab a few ingredients you need and you can enjoy these wondrous meals. Source: Odin Sphere.

That’s why most games remove many aspects of reality from games, so players don’t have to wait needlessly long hours to just continue playing.

FPS games as mentioned in the scenario are built around the fast-paced combat and going from one spot to another very quickly. Even when you get shot a bunch, unless it is directly in the head, you still have a chance to react and fight back. Having a system in the game that lets you automatically regenerate your health when enough time passes or picking up medpacks that heal you instantly are good ways to help you keep up with the fast pace action.

The 2016 reboot of DOOM thrives on its gameplay that very much has you running around gunning down demons. If realism was involved, you would have long been dead before the first demon showed up. Source: DOOM 2016.

If reality was thrown into the gameplay, we would see games where dying once removes your entire save file forcing you to start all over, or spending several weeks to a few months in a hospital recovering. Neither one is something that you want to see in a game.

Let’s go back to the survival game as mentioned in the scenario. While it does seem silly to make the structures and food so much faster than you would in real life, it makes sense for the game. If you were to spend the actual amount of time building a single hut or a simple meal, the interest in the game would fall completely. Again, no one wants to spend that much time doing something in the game, so why not make it easier for the player?

Time spent building all this in The Forest = Over 4 hours. Time spent building all this in real life = Possibly weeks. Source: The Forest.

Another reason as to why these breaks exist is because of memory and time. Games require plenty of memory in order to run things, and too much used up will either slow down the game or make it crash completely. That’s why most games will make enemies disappear when they are beaten, because having them remain on screen would take up more memory.

For time, that’s primarily for the time spent making the game. Developers spend a long amount of time making games, and in some cases they will try to find a shortcut for some parts of the game so that they can spend more time working on other parts. Games that have multiple weapons like swords or axes but having the same model is one such example, as it would take a very long time to individually design each and every weapon. This isn’t noticeable now, but it was more common for games to do this over a decade ago.

There are several other examples of reality being broken in order to make the game as it is. Monsters giving you money or items when they physically shouldn’t be able to carry them. Human characters having an absurdly high jump or even able to double jump when in reality no one could jump that high. Features in the game that while don’t make sense story wise are purely there to keep the player from getting frustrated. Items being placed in rather bizarre spots that they shouldn’t be in.

Where exactly was this thing hiding the Dark Shield it was carrying? Sometimes it’s best to not question these things. Source: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Sometimes however, these breaks can be obstructive. If they become too much, it’s possible for them to get in the way of enjoying the game. Some media creators will even go further and not use some of these breaks due to having different tolerances between abstraction and simulation. These games made by these creators however wind up being more catered to a niche audience, and even then there are still measures taken to prevent things from getting too boring.

The best way to simplify it is this; if what is happening on screen is something that isn’t possible in real life, then it’s a break from reality.

The only type of games that actually do not take shortcuts with time spent doing stuff are mobile games or simulation games. This is primarily because they are built to be played on a daily basis, with most mobile games giving you daily rewards for doing so. Simulation games, especially ones revolving around management or construction, require long hours of playing in order to “level up” and have access to more resources to continue playing.

Factorio pictured above is an example of a simulation game requiring numerous hours of playing in order to acquire more resources. Source: Factorio.

So now you are a bit more familiar with this trope and what exactly it entails. It’s honestly very surprising just how many breaks exist and how often we take them for granted or just ignore since they make gaming easier. And with video games continuing to be made with new ideas being implemented or old ones being improved on, we can definitely be seeing more of these Breaks in the near future.

Kyle Bacon

Kyle Bacon is a student at Algonquin with a passion for creative writing and video games. A quiet individual, but once you bring up a topic he likes, he will spend hours discussing it with you.

Underground Monkey

When you think their numbers couldn’t get any higher…

You might find this a rather bizarre name to give to any trope, but if you’re familiar with RPGs or Metroidvanias, you’ll have already encountered this trope in some form and not realize it. Often times there are enemies that are introduced very early on in the game that are soon dealt with. You travel further in the game and enter a new area, and suddenly that enemy you fought before in an earlier level is now back, but with a new colour, new name, new abilities and buffed stats.

This is where the term Underground Monkey comes into play. It’s essentially an enemy’s sprite or design being reused for later areas with the changes mentioned to make them ‘different’ enough from their weaker versions to give players more enemies to deal with. Most see this as a form of laziness with the developers reusing sprites to just make them harder, but there is an actual reason for this. A lot of older games, especially on the NES and SNES, are limited in what they can do in terms of the consoles hardware. Rather than make entirely new sprites that would eat up more of the file size, it’d be easier to simply reuse them since they are already there and just change the colour to help differentiate them.

Another reason could be a way of telling the story more without the use of text. Certain enemies you have dealt with before are getting stronger the further along you go on your journey, with new traits to back up that point. Animals like wolves can have subspecies that have adapted to their new environments, gaining traits that give them an advantage over their cousins. If done correctly, reusing sprites can be an effective way of providing more story for the game without being up in your face about it.

An example of reusing sprites shown above with 6 of the 15 wolf enemies you encounter in Final Fantasy XII. Despite the visual differences, this is an example of Underground Monkey.

In smaller length games, there is about three or four enemies that share the same sprite, though in longer games that range can jump to ten or so enemies or even higher. Reusing sprites isn’t necessarily limited to just normal enemies alone. Unique enemies like those found in hunts, optional encounters, or even bosses can fall under this category. This is especially prominent in MMOs.

Yiazmat, the Superboss of FFXII, shares a similar design with the optional Hell Wyrm boss, and in general the various Fell Wyrm enemies in the game.

Sometimes it doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to just RPGs or Metroidvanias. Other genre of games can also have reused sprites in one way or another. One example is Beat-em-Ups where enemies will have palette swaps, with that enemy having a new name and the various changes entailed, but still visually the same kind of enemy. Tower Defense games will also reuse enemies but may try to change things up by giving a few of them unique traits.

Some enemies in Arknights will also fall under the category of Underground Monkey with one another, despite looking vastly different from one another.

Most games will try to give these altered enemies additional benefits to differentiate them, like dealing more damage to your characters when they have a status ailment on them, or move faster when another enemy is on the field. These changes, while subtle, can help make these enemies dangerous in their own way.

So now you’re a bit more familiar with this trope and how it’s used in games. If you were already aware of it, congrats! Now try and see if you can recall any games you played in the past few years that have followed this trope.