Fire Emblem 16's Random Final Bosses

This rant randomly references a thing on the internet I like watching. No, I don’t know why I suddenly felt like doing this. I’m weird. On the plus side, you can play the game of trying to figure out what it is, I guess?



It’s an annoying, but sadly not entirely uncommon practice in RPGs to have a random-ass bad guy suddenly appear at the game’s end to serve as a completely spontaneous and frankly inexplicable final boss. The most famous example, of course, would be Necron from Final Fantasy 9--after experiencing a massive, 4-disc-long story which has carefully and skillfully established Kuja as the ultimate antagonist to overcome, you finally triumph over him...and then, out of absolutely goddamn nowhere, this big self-important god-thing shows up, starts waxing Hot Topic about death and fear and such nonsense, and suddenly now HE’S the game’s final boss.

Necron has not once interacted in any capacity with the 60+ hours of storytelling in Final Fantasy 9. Until the second he appears, there is not the slightest indication that he or any entity of his nature exists. He has no place in the game’s events, which have been, as stated, very clearly set up with the idea of Kuja being the final, all-important foe to defeat. The edgelord bilge that Necron is spouting has no greater connection to the themes, messages, and character focuses in Final Fantasy 9 than it does to any other given game. And we’re never given the slightest understanding of how and why he’s shown up, what he is, his origins, what relation he has to Kuja and the events of the game that would cause them to awaken him--the only thing I understand less than Necron is why SquareEnix put him in the game! Because their decision to do so doesn’t add anything positive to the game whatsoever, and instead only confuses the audience in regard to the story’s message, lessens Kuja’s weight as the game’s antagonist, and causes an overall sense of puzzlement so great that it breaks the player’s immersion.

I’ve mentioned before, mostly when talking about Mass Effect 3, that the instinct possessed by certain writers who think themselves entirely too special and clever, and thus to add some bizarre curveball to the ending of the game that comes out of left field and completely changes everything, is a very, very bad one. That is not what an ending is for. Endings are the cap to your creation, the final seal on your product that should perfectly conclude and contain all the events and ideas and such that have come before them. And while throwing a totally random final boss at the player isn’t nearly so destructive as Bioware’s decision to poorly plagiarize an Asimov story and clumsily tape it to the tail end of a completely different kind of science fiction, Necron is still a violation of this narrative commonsense guideline.

Sadly, though, Necron is only a representative of these random-ass final bosses, certainly not the lone specimen. Wild Arms 5, for example, has Volsung the whiny-ass lamer set up as its ultimate antagonist, but after you kick his ass, the game drops some random poppycock on you about him being possessed and/or merged with a dark ghost of sad race relations or something so THAT’S the true villain in all this. Secret of Mana, meanwhile, decides it’s got to jam a syringe of Artificial Drama into its ending by making its final boss not Thanatos, the evil jerk that the entire game has been devoted to stopping, but rather your furry airship-analogue Flammie, because of some contrived, last-second drivel about magical mana energies or whatever making him go berserk. It’s a crass bid for poignancy by subpar authors who couldn’t get the job done without cheap emotional manipulation.

This crime’s worst perpetrator, though, isn’t Flammie, nor is it Volsung’s possession by Malcolm X. Nor is it Wild Arms 1’s Zeik Tuvai, Phantasy Star 1’s Dark Force,* or Mana Khemia 1’s Vayne’s dark side or whatever that crap was. It's not Necron, believe it or not...and it isn't even that stupid fucking magic tree in Suikoden 4! Because, you see, what all these inexplicable out-of-nowhere final bosses have in common is that there’s only 1 per game.

Fire Emblem 16, on the other hand, is not content with anything less than 3 completely random Final Bosses.

I dunno what the deal is with Fire Emblem: 3 Houses. Maybe the people making it never had any real idea what they were going to do to end it, and once they got to that point, they just went with the first thing that came to mind. Whatever the case, though, 3 of the 4 paths to the game end with random-ass last enemies. And it’s stupid.

First of all, let’s talk about the Necron of the group: Nemesis. On the Golden Deer route through FE16, the final conflict comes in the form of a necromanced return of Nemesis, the jackass from the game’s opening cinematic whose freaky fetish for gluing cervical plates together in the shape of a weapon luckily just happened to pay off when it came to dragon bones.

How did Those Who Slither in the Dark manage to get the dingus back on his feet again? Unclear! Where did he get a second loli-spine sword? Unclear! Why did TWSitD not wake his zombie ass up sooner, considering that he and his ghost army are a way more effective force of destruction than their current stooge, Edelgard, can muster? Unclear! Why do they only resurrect Nemesis on the Golden Deer route, even though the events of the Church route play out the exact same way in regards to defeating Those Who Slither in the Dark? UN-FRIGGING-CLEAR. You beat the actual villains of the game, he’s just here for the hell of it, so just enjoy the cool post-battle cutscene and get off Nintendo’s back about this.

And since we’ve talked about the Golden Deer route, let’s move on to the Church route, since that’s basically just “Golden Deer Except No Claude (But to Make Up for That, Go Ahead and Marry That Hottie Who is at the Same Time Both Your Mother Figure, Your Grandmother, and Sort of Also Your Daughter...Go Ahead, it’s Fire Emblem, We All Know This is Why You’re Here).” Apparently, even though, as previously noted, everything that led to Nemesis being resurrected in the GD path will also occur on this route, Nintendo felt that the Church route had to have an entirely different final boss. And instead of just having a more advanced fight against Thales, which would be appropriate for this route since his bunch of jerkwads are the most narratively juxtaposed to Rhea and her religion, the writers decided that it would be better to have Rhea spontaneously go apeshit in the midst of delivering an exposition dump--like, seriously, she goes berserk in the middle of a sentence--and force you to put her down. If Nemesis was Necron, then Rhea is definitely Flammie (she’s even a white dragon thing, to boot), but with even less credible magic plot bullshit to explain her going berserk.

How does being in a weakened state from torture and catching missiles in her teeth cause Rhea to suddenly release her full power? I don’t know! What purpose is served in frustrating players by forcing them to attack and potentially kill the character whom this entire story path is specifically geared toward rescuing and being loyal to? I don’t know! Why does Rhea never lose control and transform due to her injuries and weakness in the Golden Deer story, especially considering that she is ostensibly even more weakened in GD since she’s implied to die after the game’s over in that route whereas in this one it’s possible for her to live on? I don’t know! Or alternately, how is it that Rhea can have suffered the exact same damage on both the Church and Golden Deer routes, yet have a chance of surviving only in the former, even though this one also has her getting whaled on by the strongest people in the world for 5 - 20 turns of combat? I don’t know! If Rhea losing control also causes various high-positioned church officials to turn into monsters because she gave them her essence, why doesn’t it happen to Catherine, who would surely also have received this treatment considering her position and importance to the Church and Rhea personally? I don’t know! If losing her self-control and turning rabidly aggressive is what triggers her high-up church members to become monsters, then why don’t we see that happen in the final boss battle of the Black Eagles route, where Rhea’s surrounded by her best and most loyal warriors and has clearly been driven to hostile insanity? I DON’T FORKING KNOW. You beat the actual villains of the game, Rhea’s only flipping out to pad the run-time, so just enjoy the chance to sex up a dragon and get off Nintendo’s back about this.

So you may be wondering, now, who the third bemusingly impromptu final boss is of FE16. After all, it makes sense for Rhea to fill that spot on the Black Eagle route, and obviously Edelgard is the right person for the role for the Blue Lions. Well, I’ll agree with you on the former point,** but in spite of Edelgard being the right call for Dimitri and company’s last challenge, she still manages to be a pretty random final boss, this time in the Volsung way, by just up and getting ultra-powered with evil out of nowhere. Supposedly turning into this big demon-thing is something she can do by unleashing the power of both her crests at the same time, a fact which is never mentioned or even hinted at prior to this moment or in any other route.

Isn’t it kind of stupid for her to only unleash this power now, after her enemies have completely disrupted her armies, liberated territories from her control, and killed the majority of her best and most devoted soldiers, even though she’s had multiple opportunities before to go all out like this when it might have made the difference between her empire’s life and death? Oh, whoops! Doesn’t it make no sense for Edelgard to only use this ability in the Blue Lions version of this battle, even though the circumstances of this battle in the Church and Golden Deer paths are equally dire for her cause? Whoopsy! Doesn’t this ability undercut the idea of Edelgard’s determination to win at any cost (her 1 and only real character trait), when she apparently won’t use it in her own Black Eagles storyline even in a desperate battle against an out-of-control dragon in the midst of a raging inferno? WHOOP-FREAKING-SY. Try not to think about the actual villains of the game you’re unable to deal with, giving Edelgard superpowers was the path of least resistance to make this final battle interesting, so just enjoy your conclusion to a path that has no relevance beyond its own borders and get off Nintendo’s back about this.

I just don’t get it. This whole nonsensical out-of-left-field final boss stuff already seems utterly ridiculous to me under normal circumstances--it’s so much of a hassle to throw Necron and his ilk into an RPG’s finale to begin with that it seems like it should be impossible that someone wouldn’t stop to think for the 4.2 seconds it takes to realize that it’s a dumb idea and decide against it. But thrice in the same game!? How the hell does this happen? How do you just decide to throw your cares to the wind and put all your money on sensation instead of substance with your final foe 3 times in a row?























* Wow, this is actually a super old trope, isn’t it?


** Although, you could make an argument that there’s still an element of the unexpected and inexplicable in the Black Eagle route’s last battle, in the sense that it even is the finale to begin with. The actual villains of Fodlan, Those Who Slither in the Dark, are a threat that Edelgard is well aware of, and has outright stated she intends to take down, once she’s done stupidly venting her misplaced fury on Rhea...and yet the game never pursues this. It just ends. “Congrats, you won, Edelgard’s empire revolutionized the social system,” with a little footnote of “o ya also dey all fite ppls hoo slithur in dark lol,” that’s all you get. In the GD and Church routes, you don’t even KNOW about TWSitD and somehow still wind up tracking them down and wrecking their shit, but in the path all about the 1 faction who actually is aware of the true villains, where following through with this plot would have been super easy, barely an inconvenience...nothing happens.