Big Baddies Breakdown: Ansem (Kingdom Hearts)

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 Hamada for edits.

Bosses are extensions of a game. If your action game is about jumping, they make you jump. If it’s about shooting, they make you shoot. They focus the verbs—whatever it is you do—into a more challenging, threatening space. Each boss will probably be harder than whatever came before it, but it’ll still iterate on ideas the game has already been exploring. It’s a role that fits nicely with the role bosses often have in the plot, where they act as the climax of an act.

But what about a boss that just… ignores their game’s themes? I’m specifically referring to boss fights that deliberately throw out the rulebook you’ve been following for the rest of the game. Sometimes, this can be as substantial as the battle being a mini-game or switching to a new gameplay genre—what some players call “gimmick bosses”—but it can be as minor as adding or cutting basic mechanics. They’re a hard line to walk, and they have historically been quite controversial. For every wildly different boss fight that’s clever and fresh, there’s probably three that are frustrating. An exceptionally bad one can be found with Kingdom Hearts’ final boss, Ansem.

Let’s back up. The mechanics of Kingdom Hearts, the famously wild Disney / Final Fantasy crossover from 2002, orbit around two main ideas: you fight in a party—typically, with animation icons Donald Duck and Goofy—and you fight in real time. It’s an action-RPG in which Sora, the hero, and his friends freely move, attack, and cast magical spells. Magic costs MP, and hitting foes refills that MP, so you’re encouraged to fight aggressively. It’s a fine system, one the game doesn’t explore as far as it can and which would be radically reimagined in sequels.

The system is, naturally, used for almost every major boss in the game. Whether they’re Disney movie villains like Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent or Hercules’ Hades, or ugly original monsters made for the game, the “three on (every)one” system holds. Sora always has his friends, magic, and the ability to run and jump. By extension, the quality of a Kingdom Hearts fight tends to be dependent on things like the number of simultaneous foes or the arena’s level design. Aspects that interact with the mechanical staples.

However, this is upended in the final boss fight, a battle against the evil scientist Ansem. It’s got multiple phases—ten, to be exact. The first phase is fairly standard; you and your team fight Ansem (and his inexplicable djinn sidekick) on a beach based on the very first level. It’s quite intense and demanding. Though referring to it as the “first phase” is slightly inaccurate. Once you win, you can save or retreat before the actual first and second phase, respectively a rematch against the game’s first boss and… the same Ansem fight from before, just without Donald or Goofy backing you up. For reasons that are existent but unsatisfying, Sora is suddenly stuck on his own, with his friends only able to watch the duel from behind a magical barrier.

One of the most challenging parts of this initial fight is how Ansem’s Dark Figure partner can easily freeze Sora in place. It’s even more dangerous without partners, naturally.

It’s an odd thing to do the same fight twice in such short a time, but there is a logic to it. You do the challenge first with a net, then without it. Kingdom Hearts is certainly aware of that trick, as it literally does it hours earlier. In the penultimate world, Sora fights his best friend Riku twice, first with and then without his friends. Of course, the game made sure to place some gameplay set pieces between them, and there was a narrative reasoning: Sora chooses to fight Riku alone to prove himself. Doing the beat again (with a shorter break before the rematch and no agency on Sora’s part) is just, well, doing it again. It’s much harder to fight Ansem on your own, naturally; he and his bodyguard are extremely powerful, hard to dodge, and have barely any downtime. But the fight also can’t help but feel needlessly extravagant, especially since the final world is already full of extremely difficult fights.

This feeling of needless extravagance only gets worse. After Ansem loses in Round 2, he turns himself into this hideous creature, an Eldritch monstrosity that looks, somewhat unfortunately, like a poorly built cruise liner. It’s called the “World of Chaos” and lives up to the name. You can just barely see him, near the top. He’s actually growing out of it.

And it’s here that things become mechanically problematic. Sora flies during this section, a mechanic used in levels based on The Little Mermaid and Peter Pan that’s fun but not great for precise combat. Unfortunately, that’s all it’s used for here. The flying form has no dodge button, and it lacks access to some of Sora’s magical kit. Thankfully, the healing spell Cure—the one your average players will rely on the most during this fight—is safe. In theory, you fly to the Ansem part of the body, whack at his torso (his only weak point) a bunch, retreat as he summons a truly upsetting number of homing magic blasts, heal in the very likely case you need to, and repeat the process until he opens up the next phase.

Trouble comes up as soon as it goes from theory to praxis. Arguably the biggest issue is that Ansem has an obscenely high amount of health, about the highest of any opponent in the game. Depleting it would be exhausting in any context, but again, it’s only the third phase with eight more to come. The homing spells are another issue, especially since they go from merely a few shots to literally dozens and dozens after you cut down some of his health bars. They hit hard, too. You’re unlikely to build up a good stock of magic, since you’ll probably get only enough for one heal with each round of hitting him. You can, of course, use disposable healing items, but there’s a high chance that you’ve already used up most of your inventory. Phase 2 is long and hard, using potions helps immensely, and in Kingdom Hearts, you’re only allowed to restock your supply in between fights—a privilege you lack when the only thing in between each phase of the fight is a cutscene. Three years later, Kingdom Hearts II would handle this with an “auto refill” system, but its absence here is painful.

The issues are twofold. Primarily, the World of Chaos is absurdly powerful and beefy (to say nothing of how it comes after too beefy bosses), making for a fight that takes far too long for a game of this pace. But you also have to do this while flying, without several of the amenities that Sora can regularly use. He lacks partners, a dodge, summons, many of his spells, and probably healing items. It worsens the pace even more, too, because those attributes make airborne fights oddly slower than grounded ones. Even if these issues weren’t here, it’s a weird choice to switch to this fairly late game mechanic after the final world already has another terrible boss—Chernabog from Fantasia—that you fight while flying. Ansem is a deeply unsatisfying trial that strips away all of Kingdom Hearts’ pleasures, though that’s true of the End of the World as a whole. The game’s last level is awash in frustrating, tiring fights, of which the villain is only the worst.

Sora dodging a few lasers; more are about to come. You can also see a small bat-like enemy near Ansem; you can kill them for some health, but not nearly enough.

This sequence is the longest part of the Ansem fight by a sizable margin, though far from the last. Afterwards, it shifts to a series of smaller, far more digestible phases. You break into a room inside the World of Chaos, fly back out to destroy laser turrets affixed to the ship, recruit Goofy in another room, team up with him to kill the “bow” of the ship, recruit Donald in a third room, kill the ship’s heart, and finally attack Ansem’s torso once again. The extra help makes things easier, naturally. Donald has excellent healing magic, and both partners can do damage. Your teammates, the lower difficulty, and the shorter length of each segment improve things substantially. These only go so far, though, and the better phases still exacerbate how the fight is far, far too long. Whatever interesting ideas it has—reconnecting with your sidekicks mid-battle, letting you cut loose with the glide mechanic—slowly break down just from the sheer length of the fight. It beats you down. Beating you down seems to be the point of the final world, really.

On a more thematic level, the fight against Ansem is also Kingdom Hearts at its most tenuously connected to the thing that enticed most players: the Disney content. The bulk of the game is spent in pretty reproductions of animated classics like Aladdin or The Nightmare Before Christmas; you team up with their heroes and fight their villains. But Ansem is original to the game and disconnected from that history. While the game provides diaries explaining his backstory throughout the adventure, his sudden onscreen appearance—roughly ninety percent of the way through the story—is deflating. He’s voiced poorly by Billy Zane in a bit of pointless stunt casting (sequels would present new variations on the character, typically with more effective stunt casting). Between that and his generic anime look, he lacks the energy of the Disney characters, several of whom are far more dynamic villains revealed to have unknowingly been in his service. His duel with Sora is also too abstract, turning the plot from a boy’s search for his friends into a conflict over an ill-defined metaphysical concept. It lacks the pleasures and accessibility of either Disney’s animated bench or Sora, who is dull but pleasant.

While it already forms the bulk of this article as it is, I’d like to go back to that third phase with the World of Chaos, for three reasons. First, it is by far the longest one, taking more time to complete than several of the other segments combined. Second, it is also the one most removed from Kingdom Hearts’ gameplay and style. You lack the Disney characters that power the crossover, partners that help you, and even terra firma itself. And most importantly third, because this is the beat on which the game chooses to end. The Ansem fight is our last experience with the game, but it actively throws out every virtue of Kingdom Hearts, be it the gameplay, setting, or tone. Those long sections where it’s just Sora and Ansem, alone in this void and trying to kill each other, are dire.

The final phase. Donald and Goofy may improve the fight by a lot, but fatigue has long set in.

I think I get why this final boss was built the way it was. It was probably meant as a celebration of Kingdom Hearts‘ inventiveness, and a desire to do something “new” (even if its elements had all been used in other boss fights). Having Darkside, the game’s first boss, kick off this mammoth battle adds a bit of completeness to the proceedings. There’s also that popular belief that the final boss needs to be tougher and take longer to beat than almost anything before it. I have mixed feelings on the latter point—I think many great final bosses work better as a denouement than the hardest challenge—though there’s definitely a point where chasing that challenge goes too far. This is one of those times. In trying to be exciting, it became a slog. In trying to push players, it threw out the crossover’s better instincts.

The Ansem fight is useful, though, if mostly in an instructional sense. It is a perfect example of how not to do a final boss fight, and more generally how not to incorporate ideas into a boss. Doing a flying section for a boss wasn’t an inherently bad idea; while the Ansem and Chernabog fights are both bad, the boss fight against Peter Pan’s Captain Hook (which introduces gliding as a mechanic) is fun. Going away from the Disney stuff to explore more original content wasn’t an inherently bad idea, even if I think it has only rarely worked for Kingdom Hearts as a franchise. And breaking up the three-man team wasn’t an inherently bad idea, as that’s a natural story beat—a beat Kingdom Hearts games have come back to time and again, almost always with far more skill.

Actually, Kingdom Hearts loves to reuse tropes and ideas, and Ansem is one of its favorite subjects. Despite dying at the end of the very first game, he and an increasingly large number of Ansem iterations tend to dominate the proceedings; he’s like kudzu in his ability to multiply and overrun. These versions are all tied to a broader villain, Xehanort, who acted as the overarching antagonist of most of the series. But even when they aren’t explicit derivations or clones or acolytes, most of the bad guys follow Ansem’s persona and style aggressively. For the most part, the tale of Kingdom Hearts I has steadily been supplanted in its own franchise by side games that delve into the series’ extensive, confusing lore. When you consider that, turning its bad guy into a refrain has made him one of the entry’s most important elements.

Left to right: Ansem and Xemnas in Kingdom Hearts III. Both characters, living aspects of the villain Xehanort, have survived long after their onscreen deaths.

Beyond his role in the plot, Ansem has long been a template for the series’ final bosses, and not always in a good way. Most of them tend to follow his multiple phases, chunky health bars, and crushing attacks. At least one even transformed into a boat-like object. In general, I’ve found that Kingdom Hearts as a franchise often struggles with these fights. It’s not really amazing at bosses in general, but it struggles with the end ones in particular. Typically, the longer they go, the more frustrating they are; the series’ most engaging bosses tend to be quick, dirty smackdowns. However, by my understanding, no Kingdom Hearts final boss has ever been as bad—obscene, really—as Ansem.

Taken with the full scope of what Kingdom Hearts has become as a series, Ansem, Seeker of Darkness is emblematic of the crossover’s storytelling, if mostly its more tiring aspects. Taken with that same scope, Ansem the first final boss is an oddly enduring standard of poor and wildly overambitious game design. But just as they are, as a collective climax of this one weird game from 2002, they’re an absolute misfire. The fight does one thing truly right, to be a finale as boundlessly bizarre as the fun crossover experience it concludes, but not a thing more. It’s a lesson in “what not to do,” and tragically, it provides a class’s worth of material.