Big Baddies Breakdown: King Dice (Cuphead)

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.

Cuphead is that rare kind of video game that puts its bosses down as the star attraction. Typically, big, climactic foes are more supplementary to the action process; they cap off dungeons or increase an already existing challenge. The 2017 run ‘n’ gunner inverts this by making boss fights the majority of its content. It does have non-boss levels in the form of (less interesting) platforming sections, but they’re the exception. What matters are the huge encounters, where Cuphead – and Mugman, for any players daring enough to try the game’s painful two-player option – tackles a giant threat.

“Threat” is right; the game’s hard. It’s a direct homage to run ‘n’ guns from the Nineties, games like Gunstar Heroes and Metal Slug that were not exactly “forgiving” to players. But in general, it also makes sense. The fights are the best part of the gameplay, so having them be more challenging makes overcoming them all the more empowering. I enjoyed the challenge, as every fight – the stupidly onerous brawl against Dr. Kahl’s Robot aside – was thrilling. But I also think the game could have provided options for less skilled players, especially given that its Easy Mode, which doesn’t let you progress and hides whole phases of each fight, is patronizing to anyone who needs it. Especially since there were many people who came to Cuphead for reasons other than its gameplay.

After all, that’s not the part people notice first. That would be the gorgeous art style, a dynamic and loving tribute to American animation of the 1930’s that caught players’ and critics’ attention long before the Cuphead ever came out. The game cribs gloriously from Fleischer Studios, the studio behind Popeye, Betty Boop, and Koko the Clown; even the setting, Inkwell Isle, is a riff. Beyond that, it draws from the filmographies of stars like Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse – characters who were among the first real icons of modern American consumer culture. This was what the game sold most of all, that it was a modern take on a part of animation history that’s effectively gone. That’s what excited me, certainly; I love Fleischer, from its nasty, sexy, smoky dreamscapes to its feverish and silly storytelling. Cuphead had been announced fairly early in its protracted development cycle (which is technically still ongoing, as its post-launch “Delicious Last Course” is slated for a mid-2022 release), but the visuals kept it in people’s minds.

But while the style is important visually, the art actually does a lot for the fights. Animators at that time were largely disinterested in any form of realism, and they warped and toyed with their characters like clay. “Rubber hosing” – turning people’s limbs into bendable tubes – was the most famous product of this genre, but it wasn’t the only one. Characters could contort and transform in ways that were shocking, grotesque, and electrifying. As it turns out, that’s great for video game characters, as Cuphead’s bosses shift and turn in absurd ways. Their limbs grow and shrink, and a couple of them even straight up die mid-match only to be replaced by a new villain.

Exit Werner Werman; enter Katzenwagen. It’s pretty astonishing when you see these happen mid-game.

One of the challenges to making a game centered around bosses is that you’re turning a trope that’s typically one aspect of combat into the primary focus. You have to establish a baseline instead of riffing on one that would otherwise already exist. Plus, you need to ensure that every boss feels unique; variations on the “larger enemy with much more health” trope doesn’t cut the mustard here. This is where the art style comes into place, as every fight – all of which are presented as movies in a Cuphead film franchise that never existed – is unique and theatrical. Every one is set up as a series of (typically three) phases, each part of a story that sees the villains become increasingly demented as they try to smash Cuphead into dust. “Dramatic Fanatic” takes this the most literally – it’s an actual four act theater production starring the boss, Sally Stageplay – but this is how it works across the board. These are stories about your foes more than Cuphead himself, which admittedly appeals to me specifically.

Naturally, this leads to particularly great bad guys. Cagny Carnation, Baroness von Bon Bon, Cala Maria… they’re spooky and zany and soaked in personality. The ability to shapeshift their bodies lets each new phase of the fight provide unique challenges, all in a way that’s very cinematic – not cinematic in the vein of something like Uncharted, but cinematic nonetheless. With the exception of Djimmi the Great (a fun fight soured by the character’s liberal use of Orientalist clichés – an unfortunate relic of those original cartoons), and Dr. Kahl (who is problematic only in being inordinately difficult), they’re uniformly great.

Just… just how cool is this?

This emphasis on storytelling and personality works in tandem with Cuphead’s gameplay, which is a bit less focused on combat than it appears. Boss fights are almost exclusively about platforming first and taking your shots as you go; you jump around, avoid whatever insanity is being thrown at you, and “parry” neon pink items until enough of your attacks move you into the next phase. Instead of being about a clash of equal foes, it emphasizes a sense of drama and danger. It forces you to keep an eye on the boss at all times – not that you wouldn’t be doing that already, though, given how sumptuously animated each one is. The artwork is always front and center, but that only feeds back into this emphasis on how the bosses look and act, and how you bounce off them.

It should be noted that Cuphead isn’t just homaging classic cartoons; it also blatantly takes from video games. Ribby and Croaks, the boxing frog duo, are Ryu, Ken, and a few other Street Fighters. Dr. Kahl is every evil scientist in a platformer, but especially Drs. Eggman and Wily. Captain Brinybeard, the game’s resident and requisite Bluto, throws a Mario Kart Blooper at you. There’s a Medusa Head and a Dragon Quest slime. And it’s hard to not see the Phantom Express and not think just a bit about everyone’s favorite suplexed ghost train from Final Fantasy VI. But these serve an important purpose of giving these characters established attacks and abilities that don’t much exist in those original cartoons – after all, those were not combat focused films.

Wally Warbles here spits Yoshi eggs, Kazooie style. And that’s not even getting into his Dr. Mario Megavitamins…

So there are a lot of great bosses in Cuphead (honestly, quite a few more than I had expected when I finally played it in 2020) and any of them would make a fine subject. But no, I wanna talk about King Dice. The penultimate boss of the game is where it all comes together.

King Dice is the second main antagonist of the game; he’s the villain who tricked Cuphead and Mugman into selling their souls to the Devil. Since the game’s explanation for the boss fights is that the bad guys are forcing the brothers to collect on the bosses’ overdue souls, he has this thematic element of representing the overarching threat to our heroes. But more than that, anyone with a casual familiarity with Betty Boop can see his main inspiration from a mile away: he’s Cab Calloway. The Fleischers hired the singer as a celebrity guest for three Boop cartoons – only three, but thanks to him the most iconic ones. He was filmed on Rotoscope, a technique that allowed the animators to trace movements that would be too hard to anime regularly. Demons and monsters got his dance moves, not just his exquisite singing voice. Calloway’s most famous song, “Minnie the Moocher,” was the headliner for the most famous Boop film. King Dice even has his own jazzy song, complete with call and response, though he saves the scatting for his fight.

So stylistically, King Dice has it down, and it sets him up well as Cuphead’s last challenge before taking on the Devil. However, he’s only a small part of his own fight, “All Bets Are Off!” Before Cuphead can actually attack him, the ceramic man has to get to him by moving across a fifteen part series on a card table. He does this by using his parry – the most important move in the game – to roll a die that determines whether he can move one, two, or three spaces. While there are free spots and health refills and the ending spot you need to hit, what matters most is the numbers “1’ through “9.” Each one is home to a sub-boss, and since you can only move three spaces, you’re going to have to fight at least three. Probably more, especially since it’s surprisingly easy to accidentally hit that “START OVER” spot. At least you don’t have to fight the same bosses again.

There’s also no time limit for rolling the bone. It’s all on you to choose.

Of course, none of these fights have nearly the length or drama of the game’s other bosses; even King Dice himself is only a dramatic final showdown as you leap above his armada of living playing cards. Instead of being a single story, the boss rush is more about Cuphead descending into the king’s world and cleaning it out. The theming of each one makes that clear: three drunk servings of alcohol, a stack of gambling chips, a gross cigar, a two-faced domino token, a crazed magician, an undead race horse, a dancing roulette wheel, an 8-ball with chompers, an a cymbal-banging monkey. They share themes of performance, trickery, and vice – especially the vice of gambling. It sounds silly to front load this – of course an anthropomorphic six-sided die would have a gambling motif – but it comes right back to the old cartoons. Many of them played with content that was risqué and sexual; they just made it more publicly acceptable by ending with the hero waking up from a dream, overcoming the corrupting force, or returning to their home safe. Having Cupead fight a symbol of gambling (who’s also super charismatic and who seems fun to hang out with) is in keeping with that.

A video of the fight with all sub-bosses fought. Embedding it is the only way I can realistically show each sub-boss.

On a purely mechanical level, the fights can’t build on each other in the way the multiple phases of specific bosses could. They’re a boss rush, after all. Instead, they kind of do the opposite and try their hardest to as unique from each other as possible. You fight Mr. Chimes in a claw machine, but the only way to make him vulnerable to attack is to play a game of Memory that fills the background. Pip and Dot’s arena is a conveyor belt filled with spikes. Phear Lap has only one attack, but he’s aided by an invincible Headless Horseman. Two of the fights incorporate the plane Cuphead flies to shake up a few of the game’s boss fights. This makes each sub-boss more distinct, but it has another purpose.

This is probably also the point at which the game hits the Fleischer notes – or at least the sleazy, nightmarish underworlds that were really only part of its backlog – the loudest.

Namely, that being distinct is important for the player’s preferences. Unless you have terrible luck (or want to fight all of them in one go), you’re not going to fight every boss. You shouldn’t want to, because even if they’re only one-act plays, these fights are still tough – and long when strung together. Even if you only hit the bare minimum of enemy encounters (three, plus King Dice), “All Bets Are Off!” is one of the longest fights in the game. Keeping health is more of a priority than it is in any other boss fight; that’s why the game at least gives you the chance to get bonus health. So, ideally, you want to find a way to limit that, to get in as few bouts as possible.

This was one of the last sub-bosses I fought for the first time, but I found him pretty easy. You really don’t know which will be easiest until you try them – sometimes multiple times.

And, more to the point, some of them will be easier for a player than others. I found Pirouletta the anthropomorphic roulette wheel nigh-impossible to beat without losing one point of health, a point I wouldn’t have for King Dice and any other flunky between us. Mr. Wheezy, Hopus Pocus, and Mangosteen were much easier, so I tried landing on them. Which you can do. It’s hard to get the number you want, even after you get the timing down, but it’s not random. You can manipulate your circumstances. And having some fights be easier than others does orient you a bit; it gives you a focus where you can try to emphasize the things that are easy or stretch and experiment with the ones that aren’t.

Arguably, Mr. Chimes’ impromptu game of Memory is something that could only be done with a one-phase boss. His being a separate part of this larger whole facilitates that.

But even when you can’t, that’s okay, because each fight can still be learned. When I first started, I couldn’t handle the Tipsy Troop, the very first boss on the board. I struggled so much against them, so I tried to always hit Chips Bettigan instead. But, over time, I figured out how to deal with the boozy trio. Not because I actively decided to land on them, but because I’d miss and would rather play with the cards I was dealt than restart. This is true of any action game, any game with bosses, and Cuphead itself. It’s a process of learning and adapting. But while the rest of the game’s boss fights tie that to a short story, “All Bets Are Off!” ties it to themes.

One of those themes? Everything in the world is stylish and terrifying.

By the end, after you’ve stomped through every other anthropomorphic symbol of sin, King Dice himself is pretty simple. He’s very aggressive with his platoons of card people (unless you, like me in my final attempt, got a rare glitch that freezes him into utter helplessness), but in more of a single climax sort of way. That part of the fight doesn’t need to be anything more, because you’ve already cut a swath through his world. And it doesn’t keep him from feeling overpowering, especially due to the way he spends the entire match hovering over you.

You can see the fight representing the energy of Cuphead as a whole. What it gives up in terms of direct storytelling, it makes up for in reinforcing the sensation of being in this world. The whole aspect of betting and choosing how you approach the final round adds an entirely unique element to a fight that’s already near enough to the finish line to not “demand” a new mechanic. You’re getting a bit of agency in how the level works, which is good for its place in the story and, in its own way, intimidating. And really, if King Dice is going to be a villain as stylish and grandiose as he’s clearly intended to be, then he needs a fight so big and hard and wild that no one will ever think otherwise.

I think it worked. Over time, King Dice has nicely settled into being a mascot of Cuphead. He’s an iconic character, with a few cameos and plenty of merchandise. When Netflix released the first significant footage of The Cuphead Show to the public, it decided to show him – now played by Wayne Brady in some shockingly good casting – instead of the actual protagonists. And that makes sense when you consider his origins; the King is one of the most obvious bits of connective tissue between those old films and this new game. And like Cab Calloway, Dice is immensely entertaining and charismatic. But as a boss, he’s also a good encapsulation of how Cuphead works as a game, and its inventiveness in harkening back to two separate, wildly distinct eras. His fight is fun and frenetic, painfully tough, and a perfect example of what the game wants to do.