Boss Design Studio: The Ender Dragon

GIF because I couldn't find a good still render

Hello, everyone! Welcome to Boss Design Studio, a new series where I overanalyze videogame bosses and tell you what I think of them.

In this post, we're taking a look at the final(-ish) boss of the first videogame I ever bought: Minecraft's Ender Dragon. So without further ado, let's talk about it.

If I had to sum up the Ender Dragon bossfight in one word, that word would be desolate.

First, allow me to provide some background. The world of Minecraft is procedurally generated, and it's full of things. In the main dimension, the Overworld, those things are mostly nature, both of the beautiful landscape variety and the plants-and-animals variety. You can also build a portal to a second dimension, the Nether, which is also full of things. Mainly lava and angry monsters, but also natural formations, ancient fortresses, and weird fungus versions of grass and trees. The Overworld has a lovely, cloud-filled blue sky with a sun (and stars at night), and the Nether is just sort of ambiently lit up. Probably from all the lava.

But there's also a third dimension, the End, accessed by finding a stronghold and opening the portal within it. In contrast to the Overworld and the Nether, the End is almost entirely barren; it has no plants and no animals, and the entire dimension consists of yellowish stone islands floating in a black void. Those islands contain three things: tall and rather creepy creatures called Endermen that attack you if you look at them, giant obsidian pillars with floating crystals on the top of them, and the Ender Dragon itself.

I apologize if I've bored you with that, but it's necessary to establish the contrast. The End, with its black void, bare stone islands, and titanic pillars, feels otherworldly, alien, and (can you guess?) desolate compared to the rest of Minecraft. Oh, and there's no exit portal until you've killed the dragon, so you're kind of stuck there until you do that (or until you die).

The bossfight itself is divided into two phases: breaking the crystals, and killing the dragon. While it's theoretically possible to skip the first phase, it makes the fight way harder, so in practice nobody does it.

The End Crystals atop the pillars send out healing beams toward the Ender Dragon, making the fight significantly harder until you've destroyed all of them. You do that by either sniping them with projectiles, or somehow getting to the top of the pillars and hitting them with something. I'd find significance in that, but I don't think there is any. The crystals and their floating cubes-within-cubes aesthetic do add to the eerieness of the bossfight, though.

(Oh, did I mention that the Ender Dragon doesn't just sit there and wait for you to weaken it? Yeah, it's still flying around attacking you while you're doing that.)

And now, after almost 500 words, we get to the actual dragon slaying. The Ender Dragon is actually not a very complicated boss; at any given time, it's either A) flying around shooting fireballs at you or running into you, or B) perching on the derelict exit portal breathing fire if you get too close. It's mostly black, which makes it kind of hard to see, and it spends a lot of time out of reach of your weapons.

The desolate nature of the bossfight comes mostly from the environment, and the fact that the Ender Dragon itself... doesn't really interact. It almost feels like it's not attacking you, it's attacking through you. It flies at you, but it doesn't change direction or stop or anything when it hits. It's entirely unstoppable; it annihilates most materials just by touching them, and the materials it can't instantly delete, it phases through without pausing. It doesn't have amazing aim with its fireballs, making them often just go past you and explode somewhere to your rear; this may or may not be a programming error, but it reinforces the "attacking through you" nonetheless.

This is the part where I'd normally talk about the boss music (or, rather, where I intend to normally talk about the boss music in the future). But although the Ender Dragon does have a designated bossfight track, "Boss" by Daniel "C418" Rosenfeld, it's not really a dramatic fight theme; there's background noise and random bells and synths, but it doesn't have a melody, and it's pretty quiet. Which means that really the only sounds heard in the fight are the dragon's roars plus the noise from walking and taking damage and shooting things, adding to the emptiness and (yes I know I've been using this word a lot) desolation.

I suspect that if I could play the entire Ender Dragon battle straight through and had time to get fully immersed, instead of breaking it up into 10-ish-minute chunks, this would be a rather haunting and eerie battle. Also if I didn't blanket the entire place in snowmen to keep the Enderman population occupied with things that aren't "getting in the way".

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for... not the Wither. I don't plan on fighting that one (at least not properly) for quite a while yet.

"Minecraft: Story Mode" by Telltale Games

I never expected I'd get to play this.

Let me explain. The original Minecraft has had four spinoffs over the course of its long life: Minecraft Dungeons, a sort-of-roguelike; Minecraft Legends, a real-time strategy; Minecraft Earth, an augmented reality phone game discontinued in 2021 because of the plaaaaague; and Minecraft: Story Mode, which is this one and which was discontinued in 2019 following the demise of the company that made it.

Fortunately, I was recently at a place with some PS4s you could play on, and one of the discs they had was for none other than Minecraft: Story Mode.

Its gameplay is kind of hard to describe; I think my best bet would be to say it's basically an interactive TV show. You make various dialogue choices and just choices in general, which shape the narrative going forward, and it's organized into "episodes".

I must make a disclaimer before I continue: I didn't finish this. I did manage to get through the first four episodes, but then I ran out of time. As such, this is mostly a review of those four: "The Order of the Stone," "Assembly Required," "The Last Place You Look," and "A Block and a Hard Place".

They constitute what's basically a story arc, dealing with a giant world-destroying monster called the Wither Storm that's destroying the world. It looks appropriately scary. 

(The other four episodes of Season 1 are just random self-contained adventures, for the most part.)

I described this game to one of my relatives as "basically if Winter Morgan was good." It hits many of the same plot beats as Winter Morgan's myriad series of rather shovelwarey unofficial Minecraft novels: somewhat unrealistic use of command blocks, bands of unlikely everyman heroes, et cetera. Unlike those books, however, this one is official, and its heroes are much more competent. Its villains are also actually competent and threatening, contrary to Winter Morgan's grandiose and pretentious bad guys.

I don't really have any desire to play Minecraft Earth. Unlike the other spinoff games, it was designed to be a mobile game, and those are mostly somewhat interchangeable.

I think Minecraft: Story Mode is the only official Minecraft product to acknowledge the existence of command blocks in-story. Make of that what you will.

This is a videogame, and it's rated E10+.

4 stars.

(Endnote: i have failed to keep to my schedule. oh the horror)

"Minecraft: Builders & Biomes"

This is basically Minecraft: The Game.

I'm joking. Minecraft is already a game. This is more like Minecraft: The Tabletop Game.

As with any adaptation of a non-tabletop game into a tabletop game (or anything else into a tabletop game), this differs somewhat from the source material. However, it's definitely the most fun Minecraft game I've played that isn't actual Minecraft. (Not counting Minecraft Dungeons Arcade, because that's a videogame.)

 

Gameplay revolves around two main trees: collecting weapons to fight mobs, and collecting blocks to build structures. There are three rounds of scoring (biomes, structure materials, and structure types), and a board consisting of a 4x4 grid of square cards (mobs to fight and structures to build) with weapon tokens around the edge. 

You collect blocks from a 3D big cube of blocks. It is literally named "the big cube".

I like how unlike many games seem inordinately complicated and then are inordinately complicated to play, this one seems inordinately complicated and turns out to actually be pretty straightforward. It's one of those games that you have to play to understand.

 

Since this is manufactured by Ravensburger, every piece is extremely sturdy. It says a lot about a company that you can just look at one of their products and be like "well they made this, it's obviously good quality."

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. You could play it with eight-year-olds if you could explain it to them.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I have decided that this blog doesn't strictly have to be solely a book blog. However, that doesn't mean it is no longer primarily a book blog; what it means is I can sometimes review things that aren't books. Like this game.)

Mini-Reviews 6: Half-Blood Prince

Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart by Mimi Swartz

This is certainly informative, especially so since I don't usually go in for biomedical engineering. It was published in 2018, but according to my research (read: I looked at the article "artificial heart" on Wikipedia) nobody's yet managed to make a complete one that's available for anything other than experiments.

Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: T15+ for gore, because this is heart surgery.

However, the book handles it in a way that's: also T15+, but for strong language (including one instance of The Cardinal Swearword) and some sexual references.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, nonfiction, rated T15+

Battlesong by Lian Tanner

Behold the third book in this trilogy (second book here). I probably won't ever read the first book, but you never know.

We do manage to |defeat the angry uber-Luddites for good| in this one, courtesy of |finding a hidden science facility| (Aperture Science, anyone?) and any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. And if you live in a world that's been forcibly regressed to medieval times, modern technology counts as sufficiently advanced.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for the same things as the other one.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, dystopian, rated T, series component

Minecraft: The Crash by Tracey Baptiste

This is an interesting look at how to handle sudden grief and other strong emotions, but I'm not sure I needed that from a Minecraft book.

At least they have their version be explicitly modded in this. Honestly, "It's modded" is the solution to basically every "There are no [insert thing] in Minecraft!" plot hole ever (I'm looking at you, Winter Morgan's unrealistic command blocks), but... I've seen two books use it, now, and one of them is this.

 

Nothing ever crashes in this one, making this a case of a Somewhat Misleading Title™.

Minecraft is a videogame, and it's rated: E10+ for fantasy violence. This one has grievous injury as well (car accident).

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, adventure, Minecraft, modern setting, rated E10+

(Endnote: What if the people in Sunker's Deep and Battlesong cracked into a nuclear isolation facility and didn't know what it was because none of them can read? I see no way that could end horribly.)

"Minecraft: The Village" by Max Brooks

 

Here we have the (apparently) final book in this (apparently) trilogy. As you might have guessed from the title, this is the part where the main characters find a village.

It did get a bit heavy-handed on the "war is bad" message; the pillagers (which show up in this) do kind of lend themselves to that sort of thing. They are a Minecraft monster whose entire purpose is to go around attacking villages for no reason, after all.

Unlike some Minecraft books (I'm looking at you, Winter Morgan), the big challenge the characters face actually is a big challenge in normal Minecraft. Instead of making a huge deal out of something that can be survived by A: running away and hiding or B: keeping your head and not being a noob, this has... a pillager raid. Those are hard, even if you've built a wall around your village beforehand; pillagers have a knack for finding the unforeseen weaknesses in your defense. (Or just for being really annoying and falling down holes where you can't get at them, but the ones in this book don't do that.)

 

I don't have tons to say about this one. Guy got competent, Summer no longer annoys me, and the villagers act like villagers. (And the pillagers act like slightly-smarter-than-in-real-Minecraft pillagers.)

This is a videogame. It's called Minecraft and rated E10+.

 

Despite it being Unsubtle™ on its anti-war and "renewable resources are better" messages, I'll still give this one 4 stars.

(Endnote: This book's setting apparently now has the Village & Pillage, Caves & Cliffs Part 1, and possibly Some Others That I'm Forgetting updates as well.)

"Minecraft: The Mountain" by Max Brooks

As you may have guessed, this is the sequel to Minecraft: The Island. Unlike with that book, though, this one has two sapient characters.

I don't have tons to say here. The isekai version of Minecraft updates a couple times; specifically, it gets Update Aquatic and the Nether Update. It's nice having a Minecraft book that's not just set in World of Color Update Java Edition or Better Together Update Bedrock; they've added some pretty cool stuff since then! 

I especially liked how the characters got to see the world updating, with things reshaping themselves and fish-as-mobs (Update aquatic hallmark) suddenly showing up.

Anyway, I was annoyed with Summer (the other sapient character; the first one is our main character from Minecraft: The Island) for a lot of the book. However, when |the Nether Update caught them unawares in the Nether|, I started liking her a lot better, because she and the main character had to work together to |survive all the stuff that came with the changes|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, just like Minecraft.

4 stars. Had I not started liking Summer, it probably would have gotten 3, but the author did a good job with her.

(Endnote: Reading through the update archives, I've placed our original acquisition of Minecraft at somewhere around the Friendly Update or Boss Update, so June-October 2016. I placed it there because I remember playing around with all the new blocks and things during the Ender Update .)

 

EDIT: Changed all the wiki links to the new Minecraft wiki.

"Minecraft: The Island" by Max Brooks

This is actually one of the better-done Minecraft books I've read. Unlike The Woodsword Chronicles or Winter Morgan's books, it takes both Minecraft and itself seriously; it also manages not to insert things into the story that aren't actually in Minecraft, unlike Diary of an 8-Bit Warrior or Mark Cheverton. (Not to say that Diary of an 8-Bit Warrior and Mark Cheverton aren't good books; they are.)

So, plot synopsis, it starts out basically the same as half the Minecraft books out there. Some normal person is suddenly INSIDE Minecraft, and has to figure out how to survive because we don't know if respawning works or not and aren't eager to test it. 

The main character handles himself about as well as I did the first time I played Minecraft with mobs on: running around screaming, almost dying about eight times, digging myself into a hole, making fifty-two rookie mistakes in five minutes, et cetera.

My main annoyance with the guy is, while most of it can be excused by him waking up with amnesia and not remembering how to play Minecraft (actually, it's unclear if he ever did or not, unlike the Woodsword players or Winter Morgan's protagonists, there's no excuse for them): whenever things are going really well, he'll get overconfident and accidentally incinerate important stuff or make an extremely dumb mistake.

But that aside, it's a well-written book. This is actually the first of the official novels I've read (Woodsword doesn't count, they're not novel-length), and it didn't disappoint me.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. Which is convenient, as Minecraft itself is rated E10+ for fantasy violence.

The book itself gets four stars; I didn't dislike it enough to give it three or two, but it's also not good enough to get five.

I don't have any favorite lines; the (unnamed) main character is the only sapient being in the story, and the only dialog is him talking to a cow. Nothing particularly interesting.

Link to the actual post.