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 Link to the Past that I played before the latest Hylian adventure took over my life. After getting my bearings and going through the next dungeon on the list (Skull Woods, if you’re curious), I realized that despite this step up in difficulty, modern Zelda bosses have nothing on what we were dealing with.
Going up against Mothula in this dungeon reminded me how much the focus of Zelda boss battles has changed over the past 30 years. This isn’t a challenge of memorizing attack patterns, occasionally refilling your health, and tearing enemies apart whenever you get the chance. Instead, my tactics were more about style run, risk a swing, miss, repeat.
Mothula provides a pretty nice point of comparison with Tears of the Queen of the Gibdo Kingdom, the boss of the Temple of Lightning, actually – the Zelda team sure does love their terrifying moth creatures. Fighting a giant winged creepy crawler in Link’s Last Adventure is no walk in the park, but after dying and respawning outside of the battle area a few times, I felt like I knew all the necessary beats to win with confidence. And I was right.
A few attempts into this mid-game boss in A Link to the Past, meanwhile, and I felt like I was definitely missing something. Tears of the Kingdom taught me that if I’m struggling, I should run away to make some space, heal up, and go again, but that kind of offering isn’t available in the SNES’s Forest of Skulls. Either you hit all the shots perfectly and manage to avoid being hit by the flames, spiky walls, and shifting quicksand, or you die quickly and are thrown back to the beginning of the temple.
And of course, that’s how it’s always been. I spent hours defeating Phantom Ganon in Ocarina of Time’s Forest Temple, The Minish Cap’s Vaati still gives me nightmares, and the less said about the whole Zelda II thing the better.
The benefit of the Tears of the Kingdom approach is that it makes the whole game feel a little more accessible. A lot of people will get to Moldorm in A Link to the Past and, after being thrown from the roof of Hera’s tower for the 304th time, turn the game off and never want to touch it again. The comparative ease of today’s Zelda bosses makes this even less likely, and I enjoy it.
I absolutely do not want the next Zelda game (whatever it is) to require me to cast hundreds of trying to become a Gohm-like boss just to keep up with the punishing #gudgamer mindset that worked so well for people like An older ring (which, incidentally, I really enjoyed), and I’d be very happy if TOTK’s level of variety in boss fights remained. But it’s always worth reminding ourselves how far we’ve come, right?
So yes, Tears of the Kingdom’s bosses might be a step up from the ones we previously saw in Breath of the Wild, but oh my god, we have it easy compared to what the series has thrown at us before.
How do you think the TOTK bosses are handling what we’ve seen before? Are you a fan of this new style? Leave your opinion in the comments.
