With the joy of finally defeating the final boss of Tears of the Kingdom still beating in my heart, I decided to start my save file on A path to the past which I played through before the latest Hylian adventure took over my life. After navigating and navigating through the next dungeon on my list (Skull Woods, if you’re curious), I realized that, despite the difficulty at this step, modern-day Zelda bosses aren’t What about what we used to deal with .
Facing Mothula in this dungeon, I was reminded of how the focus of Zelda boss battles has changed over the past 30 years. It’s not a challenge memorizing attack patterns, periodically refilling health, and killing enemies whenever you get the chance. Instead, my strategy is towards run, risk swing, miss, repeat.
Mothula offers quite an interesting point when compared to Queen Gibdo of Tears of the Kingdom, in fact, the boss of The Lightning Temple – the Zelda group certainly loves its creepy moth creatures. Confronting the giant winged terrifying bull in Link’s latest adventure isn’t about walking in the park, but after dying a few times and respawning just outside the battle zone, I feel I know all the beats needed to confidently win. And I was right.
Meanwhile, there’s been some effort into this mid-game boss in A Link to the Past, and I feel like I’ve definitely missed something. Tears of the Kingdom taught me that if I got stuck, I should run to make space, recover, and move on, but there’s no such offer in the SNES’s Skull Woods. You can take out all the hits perfectly and manage not to get hit by the flames, thorn walls, and moving quicksand, or you die quickly and are thrown back into the clearing. the beginning of the temple.
And of course, this is always the case. I spent hours defeating Phantom Ganon in Ocarina of timeForest Temple of, Cap‘s Vaati still gives me nightmares and less to talk about the whole thing Zelda II better.
The benefit of Tears of the Kingdom’s approach is that the entire game feels a little more approachable. A lot of people will make it to Moldorm in A Link to the Past and after being thrown from the roof of Hera Tower for the 304th time, they shut down the game and never want to touch it again. The relative ease of modern-day Zelda bosses makes this a lot less likely, and I love that.
I absolutely don’t want the next Zelda game (whatever that may be) asking me to dump hundreds about the attempts to be a boss like Gohma just to keep up with the punitive mindset #gudgamer has worked so well for people like Elen’s ring (coincidentally I love it), and I would be happy if TOTK’s diversity in its boss battles was still around. But it’s always worth reminding how far we’ve come, isn’t it?
So yeah, the Tears of the Kingdom bosses might be a step up from the bosses we’ve seen before in Breath of the Wild, but alas, do we have an easy comparison with what the series has thrown at us before.
How do you think the TOTK bosses stack up compared to what we’ve seen before? Are you a fan of this new style? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
