10 Scrapped Video Game Boss Battles That Would've Been Incredible
The planned Doc Ock fight was WAY better.
Transcript
00:00 Video game development is all about could-have-beens and what-ifs, with developers often having
00:04 grand plans and then running out of time, unable to see their original vision through.
00:09 This includes boss battles as well, which are often changed or chopped entirely right
00:13 at the last minute.
00:15 So with that in mind, I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com and these are 10 Scrapped Video Game Boss
00:19 Battles That Would Have Been Incredible.
00:21 Number 10 - The Hydra Half-Life 2
00:23 To start things off, we have one of gaming's most infamous disappearing acts, Half-Life
00:28 2's Hydra.
00:29 The Hydra made a memorable appearance during Half-Life 2's showcase at E3 2002, impaling
00:35 a hapless goon and then dragging him to the watery depths before the player's very eyes.
00:40 Evoking memories of the original Half-Life's legendary Blast Pit Tentacle - now there's
00:44 a bad name if I ever heard one - gamers everywhere were anticipating a similarly tense encounter
00:49 against this aqueous adversary.
00:52 Unfortunately, it wasn't to be.
00:55 Valve soon realised that while the Hydra was great to look at, it was a monumental pain
01:00 in the rear end to actually fight.
01:02 As detailed in Half-Life 2 Raising The Bar, the Hydra was a massive letdown once the player
01:07 actually got around to fighting it.
01:10 The book described the boss as an unsatisfying blob monster whose tentacles killed players
01:14 before they even realised what the hell was happening, and so the decision was made to
01:18 cut it from the game.
01:19 A Hydra that was as satisfying to fight as it was incredible to look at would have been
01:23 amazing, but I mean Half-Life 2 turned out pretty well anyway, didn't it?
01:28 9.
01:29 The Undead King Jyre Eagle - Dark Souls Dark Souls is the game that spawned an entire
01:33 genre and ensured that any title with even the slightest level of difficulty would be
01:38 labelled the Dark Souls of platformers, shooters, horticulture maintenance simulators, pretty
01:43 much everything.
01:45 The game earned its notoriety though through its meticulously malevolent dungeons looking
01:49 at Yu-Sens Fortress, and some bastard-hard boss fights.
01:53 The likes of Manus, Sif, Onsine and Smau have battered many a gamer in the decades since
01:58 Dark Souls' release, but if all had gone to plan there would have been one more roadblock
02:02 to bar players' progress, that being the Undead King Jyre Eagle.
02:06 Given Dark Souls' infamously opaque nature, it's fitting that Jyre Eagle himself is
02:10 shrouded in mystery.
02:11 There's enough of his code left in the game files to mod him back into the title, but
02:15 beyond that it's anyone's guess how he would have fit into Dark Souls, both in story
02:20 and practical terms.
02:22 One thing is for sure though, given how difficult kings tend to be in Soulsborne games, look
02:27 at Old King Alund, the Nameless King and the absolutely infuriating Burnt Ivory King, there
02:32 is every chance that Jyre Eagle would have been another royal pain in the rear end had
02:37 he survived the editing process.
02:39 8.
02:40 Great One Beast - Bloodborne
02:42 From one Soulsborne game to another we have Bloodborne, a razor sharp nightmare of a game
02:47 that lurches from hammer horror thrills to lovecraftian menace at the drop of a tentacle.
02:52 No other enemy type illustrated Bloodborne's all-encompassing approach to horror better
02:56 than its beasts though, you know, the werewolf-esque enemies that had gone through enough body
03:01 horror to make even David Cronenberg blush.
03:04 From the permanently aflame Watchdog to the skin demutilated blood-stabbed beast, each
03:08 was as tragic as it was monstrous, and putting them down felt more like an act of mercy than
03:14 vengeance.
03:15 Although it was hard to not feel vengeful sometimes when you were being repeatedly slaughtered
03:18 by them, especially that spider-freak Rom.
03:23 Each beast battle felt like a highlight in a game already full of highlights, but we
03:27 could have had one more had the Great One Beast made the cut.
03:31 Given that Bloodborne already has more than a dozen beasts to slay, you can see why the
03:35 developers might have felt that one more would be overkill.
03:38 Then again, you can never have too much of a good thing, and we'd have much rather
03:41 facedown the Great One Beast than banged our heads against the spell-spamming Micolash.
03:46 7.
03:47 Mecha Centaur & King Xemnas - Kingdom Hearts 2
03:50 Kingdom Hearts 2's climactic battle against Xemnas was already epic in its own right,
03:54 but according to the official concept art it could have been even more jaw-dropping.
03:59 Apparently at one stage, the plan was for Xemnas to transform into what was essentially
04:02 a living castle, adorned with a multi-story crown on its head, and then metamorph into
04:08 a ludicrously large Mecha Centaur.
04:11 That's right, as in Mecha Centaur.
04:14 As well-known as the actual fight against Xemnas was, these concepts are so staggeringly
04:18 ambitious that I can't help but wish Square Enix could have at least tried to pull them
04:22 off in some form.
04:23 From the very first battle against Darkseid in the opening minutes of Kingdom Hearts,
04:26 the franchise has had its fair share of colossal bosses.
04:29 Hell, the recent Kingdom Hearts 4 trailer centred around Sora taking on yet another
04:34 skyscraper-sized monster.
04:36 But if Square Enix had managed to bring a Centaur and King Xemnas to digital life, it's
04:40 fair to say they would have dwarfed the competition.
04:43 6.
04:44 The Harpy Boss - God of War
04:46 The very first God of War was a milestone in the PS2's life cycle.
04:50 A ferocious, hyper-violent action-adventure game that breathed new life into the console
04:54 and started another flagship franchise for the PlayStation.
04:57 But it wasn't perfect.
04:59 One of the game's most common criticisms was that, after kicking off with a spectacular
05:03 battle against Hydra, not the Half-Life 2 one, there was almost a complete lack of boss
05:07 fights until the final clash against Ares.
05:10 Had things gone to plan, there would have been at least one more boss fight in the game.
05:14 And it sounds like it would have been a doozy.
05:16 Speaking in a behind-the-scenes video on Delete Your Levels, God of War creator David Jaffe
05:20 mentioned the game's abandoned Harpy boss fight.
05:23 This would have been a puzzle boss fight that would have involved Kratos using the Harpy's
05:27 slaughtered young as bait, and the fight would have taken place over a large arena and provided
05:32 more evidence that you were not playing as the hero in this story.
05:36 Given how well God of War's trifecta of boss fights - the Hydra, Minotaur and Ares
05:40 - were executed, it's safe to say that the Harpy would have provided one more memory
05:44 for PS2 gamers to savour.
05:46 Not that they're really lacking in that regard.
05:48 5.
05:49 MetaCraid - Metroid Prime
05:51 As great as Metroid Dread was, one of the best things about it was seeing Craid finally
05:55 return to the Metroid franchise after a 27-year absence.
05:59 And no, appearing in the background of a Smash Bros. stage does not count.
06:03 However, if things had gone to plan during Metroid Prime's development, we could have
06:06 fought everyone's favourite hungry reptile all the way back in 2003.
06:11 Originally planned as a boss fight for the GameCube classic, Craid was cut due to time
06:15 constraints.
06:16 Jack Matthews, Metroid Prime's tech leader, would later reveal that Craid made it into
06:20 a prototype stage, but the planned fight was unfeasibly large for the time limit that the
06:24 developers were working under.
06:25 The battle would have involved multiple stages, moving platforms and, of course, finding a
06:30 weak spot for massive damage.
06:32 Given that Craid's partner in crime, MetaRidley, got not one, but two epic boss fights in the
06:37 Metroid Prime series, it's a shame that it took so long for Nintendo to bring the
06:41 fan-favourite dino-beast back to our screens.
06:44 But as anyone who's played Metroid Dread will tell you, Scott Tilford included, it
06:48 was definitely worth the wait.
06:50 4.
06:51 Gojira - Fallout New Vegas
06:53 There are three things you need to know about the name Gojira.
06:56 One, that it's the name of a French heavy metal band.
06:58 Two, that it's the Japanese pronunciation of the original 1954 Godzilla movie.
07:03 And three, that Gojira was an absurdly overpowered mutant gecko from Fallout New Vegas who never
07:08 made it into the final game.
07:10 As was unearthed by fans in the game's code, Gojira is somewhat unique from the other entrants
07:15 in this list, in that it was never actually intended to be in the game at all.
07:18 Instead, it was created by animator Seth McCoffey for his own amusement, who enjoyed watching
07:23 his creation lay waste to New Vegas' hapless NPCs.
07:26 Still, it's a shame that no one on the development team ran with the concept.
07:31 A kitschy Godzilla-spoofing questline would've fit right in with Fallout's 50s sci-fi-gonna-mock
07:36 theme, and would've provided a great endgame challenge for completionists.
07:41 Especially when you already have a dinosaur building in the game, you wanna see another
07:44 giant destroy it.
07:46 C'mon, that's an open goal, surely.
07:48 3.
07:49 Mecha - Alice Madness Returns
07:51 Normally, when a developer removes content from a game, you can't really tell anything
07:55 is missing.
07:56 I mean, you could play all of Half-Life 2 and never realise that the Hydra was meant
08:00 to be a significant part of the game, and Kingdom Hearts 2's Xemnas still felt like
08:04 a complete boss even without transforming into a giant horse.
08:08 That's not the case here though.
08:10 Here, the editing department's trimming scissors actually left some embarrassingly ragged edges
08:15 on display.
08:16 Alice Madness Returns' Mecha was so obviously meant to be a proper boss.
08:21 It arrives at the climax of the first world, is piloted by two of the game's primary
08:26 antagonists, and is standing in the middle of an arena, ready and raring to go.
08:31 But then, suddenly, a giant teapot falls from the sky and kills it dead.
08:35 Game designer American McGee would later admit that the perennial game development bugbear
08:39 of time constraints prevented Mecha from being a proper boss battle.
08:44 This is particularly infuriating as Madness Returns was torn apart by reviewers at the
08:48 time for its excessive length and repetitive level design.
08:52 It was a classic case of the developer putting effort in all the wrong places, and it was
08:55 boss fight lovers who suffered for the game's lack of direction here.
08:59 2.
09:00 Dr. Octopus Marvel's Spider-Man
09:02 Now I know, you might be thinking, "Josh, I definitely fought Dr. Octopus at the end
09:06 of Spider-Man, what the hell are you talking about, you scruffy haired mess?"
09:10 But hang on, the sequence you played wasn't actually the one that was originally planned.
09:16 In 2021, Ted Price, Insomniac's CEO, said that the fight against Dr. Octopus was initially
09:22 meant to be a cinematically spectacular knockdown brawl that would have covered all of New York.
09:27 And while that certainly sounds bigger than what we ended up getting, which was a weirdly
09:31 tame final brawl essentially in one building, Insomniac did have a very good reason for
09:36 restraining their ambitions here, and that was to avoid crunch.
09:40 Ted Price stated that if the fight had gone ahead as planned, Insomniac would have to
09:44 force their developers to endure a hellish crunch session to make sure it was completed.
09:54 So they definitely made the right call here in choosing the alternate boss fight over
09:58 their employees' wellbeing.
10:00 1.
10:01 The Elusive Man - Mass Effect 3
10:03 Mass Effect 3's ending has long gone down in history as one of the most frustratingly
10:07 anticlimactic things in all of gaming, and one common complaint is the lack of a final
10:12 boss battle.
10:13 Indeed, the final enemy you face is the legendary Marauder Shields, a joke name referring to
10:18 the bog-standard Marauder with a shield gauge that you fight at the end.
10:22 What's frustrating is that they were so close to a fan-pleasing battle, but no one
10:27 on the development team actually realised it.
10:30 So a little background here.
10:31 Mass Effect 2 had a terrific villain in Harbinger, a baritone-voiced reaper who could take over
10:37 his minions at will by uttering the instantly memed line "I am assuming direct control".
10:43 So when concept art of the Elusive Man, Mass Effect's shadowy human villain, being controlled
10:48 by a reaper appeared, we were all left wondering why did nobody think to have Harbinger assume
10:53 direct control over the Elusive Man?
10:56 Instead of a boss fight with the dude though, the Elusive Man is taken down in a battle
11:00 of words, putting a gun to his own head when the protagonist makes him realise the futility
11:05 of his actions.
11:06 And why do we end up with this?
11:07 Well, apparently a final boss was deemed too video gamey, so instead we got nothing.
11:13 So that's our list, I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below.
11:15 What do you think about these alternate boss fights or scrapped boss fights that we didn't
11:19 see at all?
11:20 While you're letting us know, could you also please give us a like, share, subscribe
11:23 and head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
11:26 Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see