Switching it Up.

Super Mario Odyssey: Best Boss Battle.

Super Mario Odyssey has some of the best boss battles in the series, but which one is better than the others? Well we're going to look at my opinion on the matter, I'll be factoring in creativity, fun, challenge, and music to decide which boss battle is my favorite.  Obvious spoiler warning because I'm going to be talking about all of the bosses. For the Broodals and Madame Broodal I'll be focusing on their fights on the Moon as they seem like more complete battles to me.

Here's the bosses in the running: Stewart. Rango. Harriet. Madame Broodal. Topper. Torkdrift. Cookatiel. Mollusque-Lanceur. Robobrood. Bowser. Lord of Lightning. Knucklotec. And Mechawiggler.

Let's start off with creativity. Every single boss except Knucklotec gets an A+ in this category. The reason being Knucklotec is essentially if the floating head and hands boss from every other Zelda game became a Mario game. It just seems generic compared to the others.  Cookatiel is a crazy delusional giant bird that you fight in a pot on a volcano and hit her by smacking her in the face after climbing up her lava vomit. That's creative!

Even Bowser has all kinds of new moves we've never seen before. Mechawiggler is a great take on the Wiggler and don't even get me started on how cool Torkdrift is! He looks like he's straight out of Pikmin 4!

Now onto the next category.

Second is fun. Every single boss is so incredibly fun. Every battle is creative and makes you think about how you damage them. You get to enjoy all these unique boss battles and I wish there were more because they're so fun! The only boss fight that is lacking in fun is Torkdrift. That's just because of how simple he is. Uproot to damage, Uproot to dodge. That's it.

Torkdrift, despite being incredibly cool, is a very simple and boring boss. He offers little in fun because of how short and simple he is. The other bosses at least make you think a bit, you can't just rely on your capture for many of them. 

Knucklotec requires you to be good at quickly dodging attacks and teaches you how to take advantage of the long jump and other movement options. Torkdrift kind of teaches you timing when you're dodging his second phase.

Each of the Broodals teach you a new obstacle to overcome. Bombs, poison, flower jumping, and whatever Topper teaches you.

I just found Torkdrift severely lacking in fun. But even then he's still a delight to look at.

Mollusque-Lanceur was so much fun to fight, for one you got to experience the Gusher which was great to use. Another thing was the freedom. This boss let you go all around the kingdom and even led to me discovering how to jetski by just speeding around the water as the Gusher and having an infinite amount of water. It was a thrill to finally be free from the restrictions of the tiny arenas you're forced to fight in for most of the other fights.

This was especially a letdown for Lord of Thunder because he's the giant dragon but all you do is fight his head in a tiny arena. I really wanted something more than that but we didn't get it sadly. But honestly even then Lord of Thunder was pretty fun to fight.

Now for the third category, challenge.

Now because the bosses go off the three hit rule none of them are really all that challenging. Occasionally when I got reckless I would end up dying but it was never to an extreme extent and usually just a stupid mistake I made. I wanted to believe the bosses were hard but really most of them weren't.

The final Broodals boss rush was hard but that's because it was four battles in a row. Harriet and Stewart are way too easy, Harriet can be stunned with ease and can even be stopped during her invincibility phase. Stewart can be taken down before he even spits his poison and he only travels in one direction at a time during his invincibility phase so he's easy to dodge.

Topper is only hard if you're stupid and try to knock off all his hats at once and Rango might catch you off guard with his hat throws and his invincibility  phase is at least a little bit challenging.

Torkdrift is so easy it makes my head hurt, RoboBrood offers some challenge but only when it runs at you with its invincible legs, Lord of Lighting is semi challenging just because of all the attacks he throws at you. Especially the attack where he slams his head onto the ground, that one almost always gets me at least once.

Cookatiel might have made me slip up once or twice but her vomit lasts indefinitely so there was really no rush. Mechawiggler made you think a bit but it really didn't live up to the hype it was given when it appeared in the original trailer. Mechawiggler's invincibility attack was way too easy to dodge and you only really had to worry about his projectile if you forgot about it.

Knucklotec's greatest challenge was making the hand hit ice but not getting hit yourself and even Mollusque-Lanceur was really easy. Just shoot through the water, get up close, machine gun his head, rinse and repeat. 

The only two bosses that offer up any challenge are Madame Broodal and Bowser. Madame Broodal would make you run into her and get hit when dodging the Chain Chomp if you went the wrong way and you were punished for trying to knock off too many of his hats at once. Bowser was actually challenging though.

He had so many attacks that were heavily timing based and he throws so many at you that you're bound to be hit once or twice. One attack just punishes you for trying to stop it. It's great! He's the best final boss we've seen recently with Octavio and Ganon being massive letdowns. And the second phase was just too perfect for words.

Finally music.

I loved it all. Now Cookatiel, Bowser's theme, and Mollusque-Lanceur get honorable mentions for being stuck in my head way longer than any other themes. They're just so good and really catchy.

This is a shorter section but that's because I love all the music from this game.

And now it's time to reveal my favorite boss battle: Mollusque-Lanceur! I just love him, his music is astounding, he's very creative, the challenge is pretty lacking but he more than makes up for it in fun. I wish more bosses had utilized the entire kingdom, say Bowser and Mario having a zero gravity moon fight. But that's besides the point. Mollusque-Lanceur is by far my favorite boss battle in Super Mario Odyssey. But they were all very good and I enjoyed every single one of them.

Join us next time where we reveal my favorite Kingdom and subsequently my least favorite Kingdom. Thanks for reading, have a nice day, bye!