Phantom Blade Zero Fixes My Biggest Annoyance With Boss Fights

This is an IGN opinion piece from Travis Northup. He loves action RPGs, including Phantom Blade Zero. Read his review here.

I play an obscene amount of soulslikes and sweaty action games, and although I largely enjoy my time facing off against these intentionally challenging gauntlets, one thing I’ve grown increasingly irritated by in recent years is something I’ve taken to calling the Scrub Tax.

But what is the Scrub Tax exactly? Well, it can take many forms. Sometimes it’s a nearly minute-long walk back to the lair of the boss I’m trying to beat. Or maybe it’s a super obnoxious unskippable cutscene I’m forced to watch every time you beat the boss’ first phase as they transform into an even more gruesome monster. Other times, it’s just a good ol’-fashioned 30-second loading screen that has me rubbing my temples in annoyance between failed runs. In other words, the Scrub Tax is an irritating procedure (intentional or otherwise) that games make you go through after getting yourself killed like the low-skill scrub that you are – things that waste your time unnecessarily beyond the hours you’re already investing in learning the encounter and “gitting gud.”

Phantom Blade Zero, though, shows us it doesn’t need to be this way, just by sprinkling a little sugar over the medicine that so many modern boss battles force you to swallow — Mary Poppins would be so proud.

Don’t get me wrong: I love getting my butt kicked in every single FromSoftware game – learning the attacks of some horrifying new foe and slowly building confidence after multiple deaths before utterly dominating the enemy is an impressively compelling loop. But I’m much less enthusiastic about the tiresome ways in which my time is wasted while I’m working to hone my skills. It’s already an odd choice to make players go through this kind of stuff in an era when more things are competing for our attention than ever before, but it’s an especially bizarre thing to include when you’ve specifically designed a game with repeated failure in mind.

This brings me to one of the most infuriating forms the Scrub Tax takes: a complete lack of checkpoints during boss fights. Nowadays it’s not just common, but almost universally accepted that if I die at any point in any phase of a boss fight, I should have to start over again from the very beginning. This means that every player is destined to spend significantly more time replaying through less exciting phases of these encounters than the later phases that are actually still challenging them. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been excited for a final confrontation with a boss I’ve crawled over hot coals to face, only to find myself irritated 20 minutes later when I’m grinding through the first phase of the encounter for the 10th time, just so I can enjoy about 30 seconds of the second phase I keep dying on.

Having precious hours eaten up by tedious boss checkpoint design has become an accepted cost of doing business.“

For example, I have a vivid memory of playing Lies of P for the first time and facing off against an extremely cool and challenging boss that had a very slow first phase. What should have been a highlight instead became incredibly frustrating. I’d fought my way through that first phase dozens of times, to the point where I’d done several completions of it in a row where I didn’t even take damage, effectively shifting gear into autopilot for the three minutes it took to get through it. By the time I finally did beat the final phase of this boss, I was so vexed at having over half of my time wasted repeating the first one that I couldn’t even enjoy my hard-fought victory.

This practice has become so shockingly common that I don’t even think most people understand just how much of their time is being wasted by these tedious roadblocks. In fact, this philosophy of game design has been so ingrained into my expectations that until I recently played through Phantom Blade Zero, it didn’t even occur to me just how much of a thorn in my side this has become. I can count on one hand the number of games that haven’t followed this format over the past decade, the most notable being Final Fantasy XVI, which isn’t really all that concerned with providing the player a challenge. God of War Ragnarok included the choice to turn on checkpoints for certain boss fights as an accessibility setting, which is an interesting option for those not wishing to bang their head up against a wall repeatedly, but I’m referring to a more specific niche of players who crave a tough fight and simply don’t want their time wasted. For people like me, having precious hours eaten up by tedious boss checkpoint design has simply become an accepted cost of doing business for a long time now.

Phantom Blade Zero has shattered the idea that this is just the way it has to be. Developer S-Game’s stellar action RPG succeeds not just because it’s full of badass, challenging boss fights that show off its grade-A combat, but because failure doesn’t cost you momentum. It trims a ton of fat and empty calories by making it easy to get right back into its showpiece showdowns. This improves its overall pacing massively. Instead of spending twice as long as you should on each boss fight, you work through each one at an incredibly steady clip, move on to the next obstacle faster, and, frankly, have more fun in the process. The 50 hours it took me to get through my first playthrough was such a refreshing experience; it made me increasingly irate that more games don’t choose to handle boss encounters this way.

“But Travis, adding checkpoints to boss fights trivializes difficulty, and we like difficulty.”

I agree that difficulty is a good thing! But if the only way you’re able to make your encounter difficult is by bloating its duration with multiple phases, effectively turning it into a test of patience as much as skill, then you have not created a very engaging boss battle. This kind of difficulty is aggravating because it’s so patently artificial. Most of the time I’m not being challenged at all by an opening phase that I’ve more or less committed to memory after a few runs – the challenge is in having the stamina to engage in the Sisyphean task of replaying the same series of blocks, parries, and dodges ad nauseam.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, by removing the need to replay prior phases, developers really took the gloves off and made those later rounds as brutal as their wicked hearts desired? Imagine a boss fight where half the attacks kill you instantly, and you don’t even mind because you’re only losing a handful of seconds with every failed run. I want to live in a world where instead of being punished as I go through the completely normal process of learning an encounter, every failure has almost zero friction to it.

Phantom Blade Zero is a fantastic reference point for this, because even when some of my deaths felt cheap (like attacks that killed me in one hit), it was incredibly easy to shrug off since I was instantly thrown right back into the action. PBZ’s philosophy of checkpointing bosses meant that I was less irritated by enemies who had ludicrously powerful attacks. That allows S-Game to experiment more with boss scenarios that simply would not fly in a game without checkpoints where the developers know each death is going to cost upwards of five minutes of your time. A death in Phantom Blade Zero is likely to cost you less than 30 seconds, so when the crazy badass warrior with a lightning spear impaled me on his weapon and launched me into space, I relished the loss and jumped right back into the fight. I want developers to be able to take more chances with boss encounters, and checkpointing is a truly powerful tool that allows them to do just that. By freeing us from repetition, it also unshackles the developer’s creativity.

Even if you think restarting from the beginning is something devs should keep around, surely there are better ways to handle this unnecessary Scrub Tax, right? For example, shouldn’t I be able to skip the first phase of a boss fight after I’ve managed to clear it without taking any damage? Or maybe after the tenth time I’ve beaten it consecutively, I finally get that checkpoint unlocked? Heck, feel free to take half of my healing items away if you want! I’m just trying to reclaim some of the lost time here – I don’t even mind if you want to make it harder.

I’ve come to the conclusion that forcing players to restart boss fights from scratch is quite a cheap way to make those encounters feel more challenging.“

I’m not saying that every developer should add checkpoints to boss fights immediately across the board, but Phantom Blade Zero has made me question whether or not it’s a good thing that so many games seem to forgo them by default. Elden Ring had the courtesy to drastically reduce the length of its runbacks to bosses when compared to earlier FromSoftware RPGs, but no checkpointing still meant a lot of time was spent repeating boss phases. Would defeating Malenia still have been satisfying had I been able to face off against her second, devilishly difficult form straight away after reaching it once? I think so.

I’ve come to the conclusion that forcing players to restart boss fights from scratch is quite a cheap way to make those encounters feel more challenging than they actually are, and I think that once players start finishing Phantom Blade Zero later this week, they might very well share the same revelation. In the meantime, I will continue my solitary war on the Scrub Tax, blade in hand, and ready for the next brutal boss.