How Cuphead's Bosses (Try to) Kill You

If you take one look at Cuphead, it’s pretty obvious where the game’s inspirations lie. This game pays homage to cartoons from the 1930s, like old Disney films and Betty Boop cartoons, stuff made by Max Fleischer and Ub Iwerks. But what you might not realise is that it also pays a huge debt of influence to run ‘n’ gun video games of the 1990s, like Contra 3, and Gunstar Heroes. Especially, their boss fights. These games made use of the Super FX chip on the SNES, and all sorts of technical wizardry on the Mega Drive, to make mind-blowing bosses that filled every inch of the screen, and warped and rotated and looked practically 3D at times.

I mean, check out this ridiculous boss battle against the Mad Hatter from The Adventures of Batman and Robin. Or this one from Gunstar Heroes where you switch between the floor and the ceiling to fight a giant robot that will randomly transform into one of seven different designs. These old boss fights were, essentially, the template, for Cuphead - which has massive great villains that are, really, the stars of the game.

Look at this guy. Check out this moon! That frog just turned into a slot machine. What! But these bosses don’t just look cool. Like their 16bit predecessors, they’re also fiercely difficult to overcome, because of their tricky and varied attacks. And that’s what I want to explore in this video. So let’s just ignore everything else, and look at how Cuphead’s bosses try to kill you.

So the boss’s attacks are ultimately, about making you move. Not just to stop you from standing in one place and infinitely shooting at the boss, but to test you on your ability to run, jump, dash, and parry. While simultaneously shooting at the enemy, of course. And to really test you on this, the game has these attacks follow a huge number of different patterns. Some fly in a straight line. Others arc across the screen.

There are attacks that bend back on themselves like a boomerang. There’s this hateful pattern. Other projectiles split out in different directions. You’ve got attacks that move in a zig zag pattern, and ones that follow an annoying sine wave. And others that fire directly at the player’s current position, or slowly chase you around for a bit. Some of those are naturally more difficult to avoid than others. And of course, each of these patterns can be made more or less challenging, by altering the speed and size of the projectile.

But one thing you’ll come to realise is that these attacks are - ultimately - predictable. The dragon’s fireball, for example, can go up, or down, or both ways at the same time. And that’s it. These cats always split into four mice - never three, never five. Always four. And this means that a big part of a boss battle is just learning about the boss. Figuring out, and then memorising its patterns. And these mini self-taught epiphanies stack up, to the point where you can now predict and outsmart the boss at every turn - which feels pretty good after having taken quite a beating.

Of course, it’s not actually that easy. You know that the cat will split into four mice, but you don’t know exactly when or where it will do so. And you don’t know if the dragon will do a fireball next, or a psychic ray attack. So you also have to be able to react to the more unpredictable elements. Luckily, the enemy will often announce what attack it’s going to do next - either through animation: this is the dragon gearing up to do a psychic attack, and this is when it’s about to do a fireball.

Or through sound. Like, these walking flames, who yell out before they jump at you. Sometimes, it’s even done through text. This is called telegraphing, and the duration of an enemy’s telegraphing will affect the difficulty of the fight. You’ll generally notice that massive, difficult to avoid attacks will have big, obvious build ups. While easier attacks don’t need to be announced for as long. Unfortunately, not every attack in Cuphead is telegraphed in such a fashion where you can react to it on your first go.

This screen-sized laser is announced via this animation, but pretty much every player is gonna get hit the first time they see it. This is one part of why Cuphead feels so difficult, especially because you have a tiny number of hit points and can’t recover any of them during the fight. So in Cuphead, death is made part of the learning process. Hey, at least you’ll know what that animation means next time you play!

Anyway. One big way that the game ramps up the difficulty in later chapters, is to layer on multiple patterns. When fighting this puppet, you’ll need to avoid these bullets, and these bullets, at the same time. And when fighting the mermaid, you might have to dodge an electric eel and a column of sea urchins at once. It’s all about taking an otherwise simple attack pattern, and just giving you other things to think about.

A fan that pushes Cuphead left or a water jet that pushes Cuphead up. Moving platforms and falling treasure chests. So, fighting this clown is pretty easy - just look at the colour of its horse to know what’s coming. But you also have to deal with this rollercoaster that moves along the screen every few seconds. Thankfully, that’s also telegraphed.

Finally, the boss battles go through different phases. So, when fighting the frog brothers, Ribby and Croak, you start by shooting flies and dodging punches. After you deal enough damage, the set-up changes and now it’s all about bouncing balls and a desk fan. And after that, the frogs transform into a slot machine with three different dodging mini games. This keeps the boss going longer, without it just being tedious or repetitive.

Just giving the boss a million health points is rarely that fun. It also means that you can learn which phases use which patterns. And that you feel small moments of satisfaction throughout the battle, and not just at the end. It also adds an element of surprise that keeps you guessing. And it dramatically ups the stakes - you don’t want to lose, because you’ll have to start right back from the very first phase.

So, let’s see all of this put together in one boss battle. This is Baroness Von Bon Bon, and she’s the boss of the stage Sugarland Shimmy. Now, you don’t actually fight her until the very end because the first three phases see you going up against three different sub bosses. These are randomly picked from a pool of five baddies each time you attempt this battle - so, that means there’s more to learn, and you have to react each time a new sub boss appears.

Now each of these guys has their own patterns. Candy Corn moves around in straight lines, and heads up and down at the edges or in the middle. Gobstopper follows you around the screen. Cupcake jumps up diagonally and then slams down. Chocolate moves around and then splits out in eight directions. And Gumball Machine moves back and forth in a small area, while spilling sweets on you. They all cover the screen in a different way, and require different types of dodging.

Gumball Machine has you moving left and right to avoid the sweets, while Gobstopper keeps you on the move because your current position is about to become deadly. So there’s lots for the player to learn, but you also need to react. Because even after you figure out that chocolate will always split in eight directions - you don’t know when and where it will split. A little telegraphing helps you out, though. The battle also adds extra layers in each phase.

The first fight is a straight up battle against the sub boss, but the second fight will add these tiny jelly bean soldiers who walk across the bottom of the screen. And the third fight has a sub boss, and those soldiers, and Von Bon Bon will pop out and shoot a shotgun full of candy floss. What you learned was a safe zone is now right in the firing line, so you’ll have to make new plans quickly, and skilfully dodge through this combination of patterns.

If you beat all three phases, you’ll then go up against Bon Bon herself, who chases you in a giant walking castle, meaning that the ground is no longer that safe. She also throws out her head, which moves in a really tricky chasing pattern, while giant rock candy wheels bounce along the ground with a steady rhythm. ANNOUNCER: Knockout! So, this boss is a delicate balance of memory, reaction, and skill. There are lots of different things that you can learn, like patterns, phases, and weakspots.

But unpredictable elements, like the random sub bosses, mean that you’ll also have to be able to react to what’s coming next. And tricky patterns - like this chasing gobstobber - and layered on elements - like the shotgun blast - mean you’ll also just need to be very skilful with the controls to keep out of danger.

Most of the boss battles in Cuphead get this balance right. But it’s easy to screw it up. I mean, take the much maligned boss Little Horn, from Super Meat Boy, which completely tips the scales in favour of memory. This guy does the exact same thing every single time, so fighting the boss is just about learning the pattern of attacks and then executing the right commands. The attacks are too fast to naturally react to on your first go, but they don’t require a huge amount of skill to overcome once you’ve learned what to do.

Now, this video has been all about how the bosses kill you - not, how you kill the bosses. And that’s because dodging attacks is - ultimately - the focus of the game. It’s not that hard to actually kill a lot of these guys, because you infinitely shoot bullets as long as you hold down the button, the targets are absolutely enormous, and you don’t need to know any special moves to win. Things like parrying and using your EX attacks are optional.

That means that it’s often more about outlasting the boss, than defeating it. And that’s why you sometimes feel like you survived, rather than beat the boss. And that’s okay, but some of the best boss battles are those where you know that the boss just won’t die unless you get in there and kill it, with your amazing knowledge of the game’s mechanics. So this won’t be the last word on boss fights. We’ll be back in the future, to talk about actually defeating these guys.

Plus, other things like the build up, the music, the pay off, innovative boss fights, and more. For now, though, Cuphead is packed full of examples of good boss attacks. Just don’t be surprised if you die a few times when you’re looking at them.

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