Archived Discussion ThatOneBoss / Atlus

• Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne should have the distinction of being the definite That One Boss game. Every single boss has different immunities and resistances (some of which change during the battle) that make them impossible to beat if you happen to have a team either weak against their attacks or with no attacks that they are weak against. What's worse is that the Enemy Scan move doesn't work against them, making every boss battle a painful process of trial and error.
  • One that stands out is the Matador, AKA the Wake-Up Call Boss Poster Boy. Mainly because you encounter him very early on and at that point the difficulty spike to an already hard game is like a steel-toed kick in the crotch. (Tip: Bring someone with Sukunda, Sukukaja or Fog Breath, and make sure you've equipped Hifumi, the recently obtained magatama that gives your main character immunity to Force.)
  • Another one is the 3 Moriae sisters in the Obelisk, you first have to fight them separately, and to make matters worse, you have to create paths just to reach them, if you try and reset the puzzle, you have to start the agonizing process all over again, just to rub salt in the wound. You have to defeat them in the pattern of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. It gets even worse when you have to fight all 3 at once a few floors up however you don't have to kill them in order when fighting all 3 of them at once.
  • However the most difficult that would be encountered is the Trumpeter; He will switch between instant death attacks and full healing to a character that has the Lowest HP, but if your party is at Full HP, he will use the technique on himself and by the way the instant death is unblockable, no character is resistant to it, it is even worse if all your party members are at Full HP when he uses it, for he will randomly select someone to kill. Also the fact that it occurs after he does a total of 8 actions makes one's head hurt due to the counting, especially if you have demons that are adverse to his elemental magic giving him an extra turn. What makes it even more annoying is that there is no savepoint near his location, so you have to make a long trek across a bridge and scarred land to get to him, and he is also standing in the way of your next destination.
  • Bonus Boss Beelzebub has Death Flies, a move that will instantly kill anyone without immunity to Death attacks, making a customized team necessary. Even if your party is immune to Death, it still does damage.
  • The White Rider is especially annoying not because he'll demolish you if you're unprepared, but because he'll ambush you in front of save points. If you're unlucky enough to be dragged into a fight, you better hope it hadn't been awhile since you saved.
    • Amusingly, most of these examples are Persona in Persona 4, including Trumpeter who is obtained by fusing the rest into one. If you use the right combination to fuse his components, you can make him immune to nearly everything in the game!
    • Trumpeter in Persona 4 is hardly a GameBreaker when you consider the fact that Persona 4's last few bosses are controller-breakingly hard.

At the end of this, it boils down to the same admission.

• The Sleeping Table, a Tartarus boss that has ridiculously amped up magic attack, one of the first bosses that uses the infinitely cheap Megidola spell line (non-elemental damage that can't be reflected) and can use two different instant kill attacks, one of which based around a status ailment. Of course there are ways to make this boss fight much easier but that usually requires the requisite grind fest associated with hard bosses.
• There are a few more bosses like this: Natural Dancer, the boss of Floor 110. Immune to wind, casts the second highest tier of wind magic (Garudyne/Magarudyne), spams Charm spells like mad, AND can use an insta-kill spell (Hamaon, the second highest tier of Light magic). At that point in the game, you'll most likely not be able to create a persona with both Wind and Light resistance, making the fight a real pain in the ass. Did we also mention that he's strong against everything except ice magic and physical attacks (and you've benched one of your better physical attackers because he's wind-vulnerable), and also likes to spam a physical reflect power (that your allies REFUSE to take on the chin, meaning you have to keep everyone standing, plus knock the barrier down while taking a bit of extra damage, plus keep yourself alive to prevent game over, plus helping out with damage output) when he's not Charming (or using aforementioned wind spells to nearly kill) the entire party at once?
• Then there's the World Balance in the 6th block. Dear god, the World Balance. It's resistant to mostly everything you can throw at it, and is armed with pretty much every high-level spell of every element. Did I mention it's also capable of ripping your party to shreds with Megidolaon? Defense buffs help very little, and when the bastard gets lower in health, it begins to drop the element spells and just rip through the party with Megidolaon (even more so when the main character is the last man standing). Word of advice: if your three allies get offed, you might as well just reset. Oh, and don't try to reflect its spells back to it with Makarakarn or a Magic Mirror, it just spams Megidolaon.
• Just to remind us of World Balance's horror, Atlus adds it as a regular enemy in the expansion FES, with all its stats and moves intact.
• Jotun of Grief, the "final guardian" boss of the 6th block. It drains or nulls every type of attack except Piercing and Almighty, which severely limits your attack options. It also tends to cast "rage-status" magic, thus stripping control of your characters.
  • However, if you only use Pierce characters, the rage-staus will backfire, and you will attack him 2000 EVERY TURN.
• Pretty much every Tartarus boss can be considered That One Boss, the damn game is pretty damn challenging. The trio of Hell Knights. Three powerful enemies with an hit-all physical attack, powerful electricity magic, mind charge, which doubles the magic damage next turn and THE ABILITY TO TAKE AWAY YOUR IMMUNITY AGAINST ELECTRICITY!

• Trauma Center: Pick a strain of GUILT. ANY strain of GUILT. If it's not Triti, it's Paraskevi. If Deftera doesn't make you throw your DS/Wii Remote, Pempti will. And every player will have trouble with Savato.
• Special props to Deftera in Second Opinion, for the fact that all the other GUILT strains require some level of skill to beat. Deftera, on the other hand, is 90% luck. If the two pairs of Deftera hit like colors in the beginning of the match, you're best off restarting the whole thing. This isn't even counting how sometimes there'll be hemorrhaging, which will block your tools until it's drained...The X mission has driven her almost completely insane, and this is someone who laughs off Savato.
• Go do the X operations on any of the TC games. Then we'll talk.
• The sequel, the aptly named Under the Knife 2, makes it even better by introducing a Hard difficulty for starters, and two ridiculously difficult new strains of GUILT (Sige and Aletheia.) Aletheia is in essence the six other GUILT in the game in sequential order, if somewhat toned down. Then at the end you get to the bit where it's a one-hit KO if you miss on the final section. Sige, on the other hand, is just demonically hard in its own right. It seems like a fairly easy rip-off of Kyriaki... until you cut it out and it obscures the screen, making you blow into the mic. Then you see it went berserk in the interim, and you are now 30 vitals less for those five seconds of blowing.
• The Triti virus. It cannot be beaten unless you attack it in a very specific pattern to prevent it from regrowing while you're working, and even if you follow the pattern, each step requires the use of several tools, which may give it time to regrow anyway if you're not lightning-quick.
• The entire game is a succession of this kind of boss. First, you have those intestinal aneurysms. Then, you meet Kyriaki. Think that's bad? Just wait, there are another six strains! It makes the second Savato mission look easy.
  • The Queen Kyriaki and her freaking pupae will give you fits. They have to be excised before you can defeat her, or else they'll hatch. She also lays more every time she's hit, meaning that you will have two or three at a time to excise.
• "Ominous Clouds", mission 2-4. Throat burns, which can quickly turn bad and require skin grafts, which will fall off if you're not fast enough. It gets worse when you manage to find the 2nd half of the poison capsule, and any wrong move at that point will cause your vitals to take a massive nosedive and likely will give you a game over.
• The liver transplant. Dear God, the liver transplant. The first part of the surgery is simple enough if you pay attention, but then the GUILT shows up. Suddenly you're playing a speed-freak memory game with what time you have left from the first part, and forgetting the pattern causes a massive loss of vitals.en you see it went berserk in the interim, and you are now 30 vitals less for those five seconds of blowing.