Boss Design Studio: Wheatley

"Well, well, well. Welcome to MY LAIR!"

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Boss Design Studio, my essay series wherein I overanalyze videogame bosses.

In this post, we're looking at Wheatley, the final boss of Portal 2. Please be warned that if you haven't played Portal 2 but do want to do so at some point, you may want to skip this one, as I discuss a lot of spoilers.

If I had to sum up Wheatley's bossfight in one word, that word would be chaotic.

Wheatley himself is a character who's been through much of the game with you. He serves as a secondary narrator to GLaDOS (who's back for this game after you and Wheatley accidentally wake her up), and the midpoint of the game involves you installing Wheatley as administrator of Aperture Science (the science facility you're stuck in) to replace GLaDOS. Unfortunately, he then goes mad with power almost immediately, and in the second half of the game you're in the odd position of trying to put GLaDOS back in control.

He's actually one of the personality cores, as in the things you had to knock off GLaDOS in the bossfight with her. Specifically, he's the "Intelligence Dampening Sphere", designed to generate "an endless stream of terrible ideas" in order to distract GLaDOS and make her not try to murder everyone. It didn't work.

The arena for this bossfight is a mess. It starts out neat enough--dark and spartan, similar to the GLaDOS arena--but, in a bit of a microcosm of the rapid decline of Aperture Science under his control, it rapidly develops fire, random explosions, bits of broken machinery, and gels splattered everywhere.

I should mention the gels, actually. The second half-ish of the Portal 2 mostly revolves around the three Mobility Gels: Repulsion Gel (which makes the floor bouncy), Propulsion Gel (which lets you run fast on it), and Conversion Gel (which makes walls-you-can't-shoot-portals-on into walls-you-can-shoot-portals-on). As the fight progresses, all three of these gels (they're more like paint, really, but I guess "gel" sounds more science-y) get into the arena somewhere, adding to the mess that it already is; you have to use them to get to the cores and attach them to Wheatley. (We'll get to that.)

And now, the fight part. Similarly to the fight against GLaDOS, Wheatley's bossfight is divided into two phases: getting the boss to attack itself, then doing stuff with personality cores. In order to stun Wheatley, you need to bait him into shooting bombs at you, then put a portal under where the bombs are being shot so they come out another portal and hit him. He has bomb-proof shields which he reconfigures to cut off progressively more avenues of attack after each stun, so there is still a bit of a puzzle element to the fight, albeit not much of one.

So that's the first phase type. The other phases involve grabbing personality cores that GLaDOS is delivering to you, then jumping up with the aid of some Reuplsion Gel and sticking them onto Wheatley. In this respect it's essentially a reverse GLaDOS bossfight; instead of shooting the boss to knock cores off it, you're shooting the boss so you can stick cores onto it.

In contrast to GLaDOS's fight, you and Wheatley can hurt each other more directly. Wheatley's bomb-throwing apparatus is part of his main body, unlike GLaDOS's rocket turret, and sticking cores onto him involves you jumping up into his face and smacking him with them. The neurotoxin is also still here, as well as a countdown timer to the facility dramatically exploding, but neither of those are given that much import and the timer sort of jumps around as you finish each phase.

The battle against Wheatley is chaotic and confusing. The death timer resets erratically after you attach each core, making it hard to keep track of how much time you have left, and there are random background explosions and gel everywhere to deal with as well. Getting to the cores is progressively more difficult and finicky as more of the stage gets destroyed. I have a pretty good mental image of how GLaDOS's boss arena is laid out and how it looks, but I have no such mental image of Wheatley's, which should probably tell you something about the chaos.

(To be fair, Wheatley as a character is also rather chaotic, so the chaos of the bossfight does reflect that about him.)

Wheatley's boss music is "Bombs for Throwing at You," a more melodic and less percussive song than GLaDOS's "You Can't Escape, You Know". "Bombs for Throwing at You" is still electronic, fast-paced, and erratic, but it consists of more than just drums -- there's an actual melody this time, played by various synths and the occasional normal-sounding instrument. Like GLaDOS, Wheatley narrates his bossfight, as do the various cores you're attaching to him. (The cores did say things in GLaDOS's fight too, but they were less of a focus than they are here.

After the bossfight comes the ending sequence, wherein you shoot a portal onto the moon, sucking Wheatley, the Space Core, and yourself into space. GLaDOS, now in control of the facility, detaches Wheatley and drags you back to safety. It's a decent ending sequence, albeit undermined somewhat by the fact that the main character's hands are abruptly visible onscreen for the first time in two entire games.

I should explain that. The Portal series is steadfastly first-person, such that the only way to even see your character is to do some clever maneuvering and looking through portals, and by the end of Portal 2 the player is used to that. Suddenly seeing the main character's hands after two games of not doing exactly that is bad for immersion, and I wish they'd found some other way to handle it.

Wheatley's bossfight is fast-paced, chaotic, and rather confusing, with more direct attack than Portal's final battle but with an otherwise similar structure. In many respects it's sort of a reverse GLaDOS bossfight, what with attaching instead of removing cores and trying to put GLaDOS back in control rather than get rid of her. To be honest, I think I liked GLaDOS's bossfight better.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for the first of many bosses from a game about a knight.