It seems to be a bit of an unfashionable opinion these days, unless you’re wanking over Dark Souls, but I really enjoy boss fights in video games. I have done ever since I encountered my first one: a big horrible tentacly thing that shot what looked like sperm at you at the end of the first level of Psyclapse’s Menace, a not-terrible horizontally scrolling shoot ’em up on the Atari ST. (Its quasi-sequel Blood Money was better, or at least I thought it was, since I could actually complete a level in it; I never did beat that boss in Menace.)

Specifically, I enjoy boss fights that revolve around learning a boss’s attack patterns, how to avoid or counter them and when are the openings you should use to launch your own attack. Conversely I tend to dislike boss fights where you’re just up against a bullet-sponge enemy and they’re either acting completely randomly or according to more unpredictable AI. I don’t want them to act like a human opponent, in other words; if I want to fight something like a human opponent, I can just play a multiplayer game and fight actual human opponents.

Thankfully, it seems a lot of game designers out there feel the same way as I do, or at least enjoy designing encounters of this type. Final Fantasy XIV, for example, is full of bosses where you need to learn the mechanics, where to stand and what to do at all points in the fight, particularly in high-level challenges that require you to be on top of your game. Your average bullet hell shoot ’em up, too, tends to have bosses with predictable patterns that are as much about avoiding veritable hailstorms of bullets as they are about dealing damage to your opponent.

What I’m discovering with my first foray into the Ys series is that Ys has fantastic bosses. I would perhaps exclude Ys I from that description, owing to the fact that its bosses — particularly its final boss — are a bit rubbish, but from Ys II onwards, Ys bosses are exactly the sort of thing I really enjoy.

I’m currently playing through Ys Origin, which seems to be one of the more well-regarded recent installments in the series. Tonight I fought a boss which took a good four or five attempts to master, and I really enjoyed it; I didn’t feel frustrated at any point, even when I failed, because I felt like I was learning something with each new attempt rather than just hoping my luck would be a little better.

The boss in question was “The Construct”, who is a big giant mechanical beastie that lives in a lava pit. In the first phase of your fight with him, he has a couple of different attacks: pulling back one of his fists to slam it down a moment later on the platform you’re standing on (which can be avoided by running away from the fist he pulls back), extending both his arms and spinning around (which can be avoided by a well-timed jump) and summoning a string of lasers from the ceiling (which can be avoided by moving out of the shining circle that appears on the ground a moment before the laser actually fires). The first phase essentially requires you to knock both of his hands off when he slams his fist down on the platform: avoid the slam itself, then dash back in and hit him in the mechanical wrist until his hand falls off.

Once you’ve done this, he then starts a different attack pattern: alternating between lurching forwards and biting the platform you’re on (which knocks you back into the lava if you don’t jump out of the way and avoid the shockwave this causes) and vomiting up an annoying little flamey creature which gets in your way and chips away at your health if you don’t deal with it quickly. In this phase, you actually get to cause some damage to the boss’s life bar by hitting him in the gem on his forehead when he bites the platform.

Following this, the process repeats, but harder; knock his hands off when he slams his fists down again, but this time there are bits of the platform missing you’ll have to jump over when avoiding his various attacks. Then smack his forehead around a bit. Then the final phase adds an entertaining attack where he sweeps his hand slowly around the platform, knocking its sections into the lava as he does so, requiring you to run for dear life around the platform until he tires of this particular activity and returns to trying to turn you into a nice pâté.

I enjoyed this boss fight because at no point did I feel like it was patronising me, but at the same time I was able to figure out what I was supposed to do without resorting to guides and walkthroughs. It was an excellent piece of solid, enjoyable game design, and a potent reminder that sometimes the most technologically advanced ways of doing things with artificial intelligence and the like aren’t necessarily the best.