Hollow Knight Godmaster & What Makes a Good Boss Rush
A lone bug stands at the entrance of the realm of the gods wielding its trusty sword. Standing before it is a collection of every single foe it’d previously slain in its adventure. Swinging its sword, the bug faces down its foes once more in a gauntlet as it seems fate has ordained. Each one falling one by one as they had the first time they had the misfortune of fighting this seemingly insignificant bug. Then, a careless mistake results in the bug being slain, and its sent all the way back to the beginning of this gauntlet.
This is the experience provided by the latest DLC for Hollow Knight, Godmaster. The third of three planned free content packs for the game, Godmaster provides players with multiple boss rush gauntlets where they face off against the myriad of bosses they’ve killed throughout the game. Along with the boss rushes, there is some new lore and a few new endings to the game. However, the boss rushes are the real meat of the pack.
Playing Godmaster made me begin to ruminate on what it is that makes a good boss rush. Some boss rushes are exhilarating tests of skill whereas others are slogs to drag yourself through. I finally figured out what I think makes a good boss rush, and how Godmaster both exceeds and falls short of my standards.
The most important thing for a boss rush is for it to be fun to play. This may seem like an obvious statement, but not every game places its focus on gameplay. I don’t think this is a bad thing per se as I love games with a heavier focus on narrative over gameplay. I mean Yoko Taro is one of my favorite game directors. However, these types of games are not ideal for a boss rush. If the game is going to force you to go through a challenging gauntlet, it must be fun to play to make it worth going through again and again with each and every death. Tight controls are also important because if one feels a death isn’t their fault, it would be infuriating. While this is always important, losing to a single boss for something out of your control is a much different experience than losing to the tenth boss due to something out of your control. In this regard, Hollow Knight passes with flying colors. This is already known to players of the game, but Hollow Knight sports some of the tightest controls and best boss fights of this decade.
The next aspect of a good boss rush is being relatively fast to get through once. you know what you’re doing. Boss gauntlets by their very design are long and arduous, however, this feeling should diminish with each successive playthrough. This is vital to making the player feel they’ve grown in skill, and making the fights less of a chore to get through as you make your way to the point that killed you before. This is where Godmaster falters. The DLC contains five separate boss gauntlets, which the game refers to as pantheons, and completing all five is required to beat it. Four of them are fantastic. They test your skills and endurance whilst pitting you against some of the best bosses the game has to offer, and even throwing in some new ones.
Unfortunately, the fifth one is a bit different. The fifth gauntlet is a fight against every single boss from the entirety of Hollow Knight. There are forty-two separate fights. You have to fight them all in a row. Every. Single. One. The sheer number of bosses means that even a skilled player would take quite a bit of time to get back to the point they died assuming they died to one of the three super hard fights toward the end. The YouTube videos I find of the gauntlet last up to 45 minutes, which isn’t too bad by itself, but becomes unacceptable when you factor in the amount of times you’ll be replaying as you likely won’t succeed on your first try. Quite frankly, it’s a boring chore that I refuse to get through. An obnoxious challenge that ceases to be fun. It wouldn’t be the biggest deal in the world, but there’s another problem with this gauntlet. Remember the two new endings included? They’re hidden behind this absurdly brutal challenge. Hollow Knight has always hidden things like endings behind brutally hard challenges, even in the base game, but Godmaster takes it to ludicrously unfun heights.
To end on a more positive note though, I’ll focus on the final aspect of a good boss rush, and one that Godmaster embodies with flying colors. For me, a good boss rush has narrative weight driving it. There’s a dramatic push driving the character to go through this ordeal. This is best exemplified with the game series that popularized the boss rush, the Megaman series. Every Megaman game has eight bosses to fight, and at the end of the game the player must fight all eight one after another before finally gaining access to the final boss. In Megaman’s case, the boss rush occurs at the climax of the story. The tension of the final fight being just around the corner pushes Megaman to go through this ordeal as a final test of sorts that proves his worth before being allowed entry into the final arena.
Godmaster, however, takes a bit of a different approach. Being the final of the free DLCs, and supposedly the final adventure of The Knight we’ve played as for over a year now, Godmaster serves as a sort of greatest hits of The Knight’s adventures. There’s an almost wistful feeling as the player faces all the foes they’ve slain throughout their adventure one final time. In a way, it is like a dark victory lap for the player as they get to relive every single time they were brutally killed by each of the games forty-two bosses. In a way, even the fifth gauntlet serves a similar function as the Megaman gauntlets, as the player, being propelled by finally being within reach of the true end of their journey, ventures into the hell that is the “true” boss rush, and emerges from the other side with an ending in tow.
In case it’s not clear, I truly love Godmaster. It’s a fantastic addition to, quite possibly, one of my favorite games of all time. It focuses on my favorite aspect of Hollow Knight, the bosses, and results in a truly memorable experience. It’s not perfect, but I’m glad The Knight got the send off it deserves, and I’m excited for whatever Team Cherry does next. Hopefully whatever’s next includes the promised Hornet DLC cause I’m excited for that. Seriously though, fuck the fifth pantheon.
