Big Baddies Breakdown: Bowser (Super Mario 64)

In Big Baddies Breakdown, Wolfman Jew analyzes all sorts of boss fights across the games industry. The catch: one boss per game. Many of these are brilliant, some of them poor. Several show technical polish, while others tell stories through their fights. But all are worthy of discussion.

Thanks to Cart Boy for edits.

The fights:

Super Mario 64 is many things: inventive, balletic, innovative. But it’s arguable that above all, it’s an ad, 1996’s best salesman for the possibilities in 3D game design. It’s rare to find a game as singularly devoted to exploring a new field as Mario 64 is to three dimensional space. Building a game in what was very new ground meant reimagining the logic of Mario’s world, and the logic of Mario. He still jumps and runs and stomps on Goombas, but he has to do it in a world that’s less precise and more exploratory. There’s only a few time limits, spaces and pits are generous, and fighting enemies isn’t a big part of the experience. You’re moving around, not in one direction, and the game puts in all its time and effort to help orient players and explore the possibilities of a fully three dimensional space. It’s a learning experience for everyone.

The charming, friendly, milquetoast King Bob-Omb. He doesn’t even hurt you!

Because of that, it had to take a special tack to its boss fights. Super Mario bosses were iconic to be sure, but they were fairly basic: obstacles to be avoided and occasionally hit. In the first Super Mario Bros., the terrifying Bowser started off as a giant slab you had to leap over, sneak underneath, or slowly kill. This idea of bosses as giant obstacles is retained in Mario 64, but it couldn’t be nearly as tense as duels with Iggy Koopa on a bobbing platform. So arenas were made larger, bosses were slower, and more emphasis went into making sure Mario had ample space to escape. The first two bosses, King Bob-Omb and the Whomp King, have their weaknesses in their backs (you grab the former from behind to toss him around and bait the latter by moving to his side). You orbit them, dancing around their arenas instead of just running at them. Later fights get a bit more complex and play with the formula, but there’s generally an emphasis on giving you ample space. And both fights are the first episodes of the first two worlds; you can avoid them entirely, but most players will likely take on both of them.

And then Bowser comes in. The game’s first act is by far its quickest, in which Mario gathers at least eight stars out of a total of thirty-eight, most of which are prizes in basic exploration challenges. That opens up the door to a boss level, the first of three required to access new sections of the game’s castle and finish the story. Bowser in the Dark World is a fiendish course, a gauntlet that ramps up the challenge significantly. Far from the more open gardens of the game’s initial five worlds, it’s an obstacle course without a net. You’re adjusting to multiple new mechanics and enemies – fire that makes Mario run uncontrollably, electric balls that stun him, moving platforms – with a bottomless pit to keep things dangerous. Mario 64 has an incredibly liberal attitude towards difficulty, with easy demands for how many challenges players have to complete. But these three levels are glaring exceptions.

The beginning of the Dark World – a literal trial by fire.

All three of them – Bowser in the Dark World, Bowser in the Fire Sea, and Bowser in the Sky – are capped off with a brawl against the Koopa King, and this first battle puts your spatial reasoning and agility to the test. Like King Bob-Omb, this is a wrestling ring, and you have to grab Bowser from the back. Unlike King Bob-Omb, Bowser is about three times Mario’s height and breathes fire, a danger you’ve only just met. Like how he functioned in Super Mario Bros., he’s a giant brick who takes up space and demands that you come close to hurt him; he even does a leaping slam attack to force you away. When you do come close and pick up the tail, there’s another issue: you have to toss him into one of several mines floating just off the edge of the floating arena. It’s a difficult move, and both intuitive and unintuitive. You swing Bowser by physically spinning the control stick, which is really cool! It provides a natural sense of movement, and just makes sense – especially in the world of Mario 64, where everything feels natural. But he’s also so heavy and hard to move (and that kind of rapid motion can be difficult for some players, so that’s not good).

The game, it should note, gives you a somewhat blunt explanation for all this. When you encounter Bowser, he says “go ahead–just try to grab me by the tail! You’ll never be able to swing ME around!” It’s about as subtle as the game really gets; a hint inside some enjoyable bad guy braggadocio. It’s fair to not assume that every enemy needs to be grabbed from behind, and there aren’t a lot of ways the game could telegraph which part of Bowser is safe to touch. But you’re not really told how to swing HIM around (let alone into the mines, though I think it’s fair to say they’re big enough to be a natural target).

There’s a joke to be made about Mario throwing the hammer and Bowser having literally thrown hammers in his debut.

The next two Bowser fights continue this, but they appreciably shake things up. The second one gives Bowser a few new moves, notably a slam that physically tilts the entire arena (it’s far scarier than his new teleportation skills). The third adds even more moves, alongside a twist: you have to hit him into three mines, and after the second, Bowser causes most of the stage to fall into the abyss. It follows a pattern of each battle giving him more attacks – mostly fire attacks – that take up room or turn into obstacles. Essentially, Bowser’s main move is taking space from Mario in a very physical sense. Space is one of your best friends in Super Mario 64; it’s the thing that helps you overcome screw ups and learn how to navigate in 3D space. It give you a sense of visual perspective. And a boss removing that, or forcing you to fight to get some back, is a natural, and intimidating, challenge.

In a lot of ways, that’s what most bosses do. It’s what Bowser’s always done, whether it’s destroying his own floor in Super Mario Bros. 3 or tossing robots around in Super Mario World. It’s what he’d do later in Super Mario Sunshine and Galaxy 2 and 3D World. And really, in platform games, that’s typically the role bosses hold, especially those in Super Mario 64. Those are games about navigating space, so boss fights stick you in arenas where safe spaces are in short supply. But it does feel somewhat special with him. There’s a sense of antagonism and threat that the game’s other bosses don’t really have, and it translates to these weird floating arenas that only exist for Bowser to bully Mario.

Just look at these things! They’re just these giant circles over nothing, with the only bits of detailing being skyboxes you don’t want to fall into and the mines. The other bosses tend to have something a bit more… detailed in their lairs. They’re on cliff tops you can climb back to if you fall off, or weird sunken chambers you have to seek out. There’s something imposing about how Bowser’s arenas have virtually nothing but the necessary components. A lot of Mario 64’s visual style is like that to an extent. While it has good coloring work and a great use of objects, its graphics were always meant to be secondary to the core mechanics. And even then, the Bowser fights do even less visually, which is weird; you want the most graphical oomph to be in the biggest, most important moments. But it works. It makes things feel starker and more intense – like Bowser’s just pushing down on the game’s prettiness.

With a satisfying (if potentially difficult to exploit) core mechanic, an overbearing foe, and a general sense of dread, it’s no wonder the Bowser fights stick out in players’ minds as much as they have. Part of it is Super Mario 64 not having a ton of other bosses, with many of them being less exciting and all of them being totally avoidable. But he also comes with a shift in tone – literally; even the score changes to tenser, more serious music in his levels – and play style that’s really upending. For three short bouts, Mario 64 effectively becomes a different game, one more threatening and intimidating, but still as big and ambitious. In a way, the Koopa King upends the game as much as the game itself tried to upend the design conventions of its day. That he succeeds in a game as big as this one is an accomplishment.