MALADROITHIM'S PROFILE

It's currently fashionable in Western game design in general to place very little emphasis on climactic boss fights. Eastern game design remains boss-centric, though, and most action games or RPGs I play from Japan (whether Metroid, Devil May Cry, or Dragon Quest Monsters) use boss fights as a climax or exclamation point at the end of a scenario.

In my opinion, it's really important to have a climax at some point in each scenario of gameplay -- in the case of a cut-and-dried RPG, your dungeon scenario, and in other genres, your area, stage, track, or venue. Since the backbone of most video games' gameplay is the act of killing bad guys, the climax of each scenario is most naturally a boss fight. Games that tend to drag on or get dull are the games without these sorts of climaxes.

One really effective climax that hasn't been mentioned is The Difficult Decision. In the latest Splinter Cell game (by "latest" I mean "over a year ago"), the climax of the game sets you looking down the iron sights of your pistol, which is aimed at someone you are instructed to shoot, but do not want to. Bioware games, and even more notably CD Projekt's The Witcher, punctuate nearly every event in the game with a difficult decision; for example, one event in Mass Effect leaves you with the decision to bring forth the extinction of a sentient species. Curiously, the characters in Mass Effect accuse you of making the wrong decision no matter what you do.

The Witcher handles this climax type in a really unique way, because it constantly forces you to make difficult decisions that will cause enormous harm to large amounts of people either way. Because absolutely nobody else in the game world really deserves to live and especially does not deserve to be helped or protected from danger (the game world is populated with selfish, scheming, stupid, rotten people), the difficult decisions in The Witcher really leave you feeling kind of uncomfortable.

What's really neat about the Difficult Decision climax type is that it is easily and frequently rolled up into other climax events -- for example, boss fights or orgasms. Unfortunately, most games incorporating the Difficult Decision event type tend to disregard the future impact of any decision you make, aside from your character growing horns or something.

Going Postal and Making Money by Terry Pratchett. I consider them the same book. Brilliant, and any fan of Harry Potter should probably read Pratchett's Discworld series because JK Rowling's work is practicaly plagiarist.

Messiah by George Friedrich Handel. This is a three-hour work that the famous Hallelujah chorus comes from. In my opinion, the Hallelujah chorus is about the least interesting part but whatever.

Yeah, the random dungeon generator must be pretty sophisticated.