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| 3 | %% This page has been alphabetized. Please add new examples in the correct order. Thanks! |
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| 6 | |
| 7 | %% Image moved to GoddamnedBoss per Image Pickin' thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1586470388004365700 |
| 8 | %% Previous thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1376147915016817300 |
| 9 | %% Please start a new thread if you'd like to discuss a new image. |
| 10 | %% |
| 11 | This page is for venting on bosses that gave large numbers of people grief. |
| 12 | |
| 13 | Remember: do not tell people how to win. |
| 14 | |
| 15 | Note: While {{Shoot Em Up}}s are widely regarded as Action games, they have [[ThatOneBoss/ShootEmUp their own page]]. So do ThatOneBoss/{{First Person Shooter}}s. |
| 16 | |
| 17 | '''NOTE:''' {{Final Boss}}es and {{Wake Up Call Boss}}es are not allowed unless they're overly difficult by their standards. {{Superboss}}es are not allowed; they're optional and have no standards for difficulty. |
| 18 | |
| 19 | ---- |
| 20 | !!Examples: |
| 21 | |
| 22 | [[index]] |
| 23 | * ''ThatOneBoss/TheBindingOfIsaac'' |
| 24 | * ''ThatOneBoss/{{Boktai}}'' |
| 25 | * ''ThatOneBoss/{{Bomberman}}'' |
| 26 | * ''ThatOneBoss/{{Castlevania}}'' |
| 27 | * ''ThatOneBoss/CrashBandicoot'' |
| 28 | * ''ThatOneBoss/DeadRising'' |
| 29 | * ''ThatOneBoss/DevilMayCry'' |
| 30 | * ''ThatOneBoss/DonkeyKong'' |
| 31 | * ''ThatOneBoss/{{Kirby}}'' |
| 32 | * ''ThatOneBoss/TheLegendOfZelda'' |
| 33 | * ''ThatOneBoss/MegaMan'' |
| 34 | * ''ThatOneBoss/{{Metroid}}'' |
| 35 | * ''ThatOneBoss/NoMoreHeroes'' |
| 36 | * ''ThatOneBoss/{{Rosenkreuzstilette}}'' |
| 37 | * ''ThatOneBoss/SonicTheHedgehog'' |
| 38 | * ''ThatOneBoss/SuperMarioBros'' |
| 39 | * ''ThatOneBoss/{{Terraria}}'' |
| 40 | * ''ThatOneBoss/WarioLand'' |
| 41 | [[/index]] |
| 42 | |
| 43 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 44 | |
| 45 | [[folder:Others Part 1]] |
| 46 | * ''VideoGame/{{Alundra}}'': |
| 47 | ** The Watcher In The Water. An earlier boss with lots of health for that point in the game, a good attack radius, and your offense and defense are both extremely limited which makes this fight ''much'' tougher than it should be. |
| 48 | ** The second battle against the Soul Leach (from Giles' Nightmare) is much harder than the first, as you ''have'' to protect Giles at all cost since [[OneHitKO if Giles is swallowed by the Soul Leach even once, you instantly die no matter what.]] The best part is that the save point is extremely far from the boss room, which means that if you mess up, you have to go through most of the dungeon again just to reach ThatOneBoss. |
| 49 | ** Zorgia. Even with the decreased boss HP in the English version, he still takes a metric ton of hits to kill, and his buzzsaws are hard to avoid and do a ton of damage, easily turning the fight into a war of attrition that you're most likely going to lose. |
| 50 | * ''VideoGame/ArmoredCoreVIFiresOfRubicon'': Balteus quickly established itself as one of the most difficult bosses in the game, being the last major fight in the game's first chapter (The "Attack the Watchpoint" mission) and a WakeUpCallBoss ''par excellence''. Its weapons include machine guns, shotguns, grenade launchers that will track where you're going before firing, and a MacrossMissileMassacre device that it will use a lot, all of which will quickly place you in a stagger state if you don't stay on your toes. Putting Balteus into stagger is a monumental task unto itself, thanks to its Pulse Armor protecting it from any stagger damage until it breaks, in addition to it being extremely nimble and hard to pin down. After reducing its health by about a third, it then decides let out a massive AOE blast of Assult Armor energy that you need to get out of the way unless you want to see a massive chunk of your AP gone before deciding to break out its flamethrowers to attack at close range, which ''will'' quickly kill you unless you can dodge them, Stagger you if you somehow don't die, and will make you easier to stagger if he keeps hitting you with them. Also, keep in mind that before this fight, you have to do battle with another AC, Sulla, before you get to the main event of fighting Balteus. Sure, there's a checkpoint before both him and Balteus but it's not going to matter if you don't have the right build to handle both of them if and when you decide to go for a S rank on "Attack the Watchpoint". |
| 51 | * ''VideoGame/BlasterMaster'': |
| 52 | ** Good luck beating the boss of Area 6 without cheating. It's a palette-swap of Area 2's boss, but it has more HitPoints, projectile attacks in addition to its claws, and gives you very little room to maneuver. |
| 53 | ** The boss of Area 5. Those bubbles he shoots will block your shots, and he spews out more and more as you wear him down. It doesn't help that the grenade-pause trick doesn't work against him. Funny enough, if Jason kept the Penetrator or the Wave Gun in ''Zero'', this boss is a non-issue. Gunvolt, on the other hand, will invent compound swears due to his Cerberus darts not piercing Hard Shell's frontal carapace. |
| 54 | * Kakistos in ''VideoGame/BuffyTheVampireSlayerChaosBleeds''. You fight him in an cramped area where he is using three magical orbs to restore his health: you have to hit each orb three times (which means you have to go and hit each orb once, then hit each orb again, and then once more) to destroy them. While zombies come out of the ground and get in your way and attack you. And Kakistos hits you with fireballs and flaming oil bombs that chew right through your life bar, if he doesn't just kick you upside the head. And then when the orbs are destroyed, you still have to take him out. With zombies still coming. Strange how an old vampire is harder then the source of all evil. |
| 55 | * ''VideoGame/CaveStory'': |
| 56 | ** The Core (in the Labyrinth), which not only fires more bullets than ''the final boss'' ([[spoiler:Undead Core, which is actually the same core, but possessed by the Doctor]]), and only allows you to fire on it in specifically defined places, but periodically ''fills the room with water'', not only forcing you to immediately rush away from the boss, often during the short windows in which it is vulnerable, but restricting your movement and making it much harder to actually ''dodge'' the projectiles. Made worse by the smaller Corelings that circle the bigger one. You can shoot them to stun them temporarily, but the only part that takes damage is the main Core, and only when its eyes are open, which only lasts for a few seconds. The problem is that the Corelings tend to get in the way of your bullets. If you're using Blade lvl 3, one Coreling in the wrong place can really screw you over. Then there's Hard Mode. 3 HP (8 in 3D). No missiles. You cannot get hit by any of the Core's attacks at all and your strongest offense is gone. Unlike other bosses, the Core likes keeping a certain distance to your right, meaning you can't use a defensive strategy. The fight becomes a LuckBasedMission based on which Corelings become active and how many of the bullets you can destroy and/or dodge while damaging the Core. |
| 57 | ** Monster X, found a few levels prior to The Core, shares The Core's invulnerability except at specific times, and floods you with bullets, or in its [[TurnsRed second stage]] homing missiles, when it ''is'' vulnerable. It also forces the player to [[ColossusClimb ride on it]] or be run over, and you risk being smashed into the walls of the room. |
| 58 | ** [[spoiler:Toroko]]. Her attacks can be dodged, but doing so is often difficult, and Mooks also spawn, which ''seem'' not to be much of a threat, until you end up having to kill them while dodging the main attacks. Each time you are hit, you will likely lose a level from your weapon. In addition, you have to be very careful with your health as afterwards, you will have to go quite a way for a save point or any decent amount of health refill. At least you have the Blade when you fight Monster X, which wrecks it really quickly at level 2. You can only take TWO OR THREE hits before you DIE! The Machine Gun helps, but only at level 3 or until it runs out of ammo, and if you're trying to get the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Spur]], you cannot have the Machine Gun. And this is something that [[spoiler:[[WasOnceAMan was once a cute little bunny]]]]. |
| 59 | * ''VideoGame/CustomRobo Arena''. |
| 60 | ** For the most part, the battles are moderately challenging, and the rules are clearly defined. The last four 'face' opponents according to the plot are slightly harder, mostly due to being cheaters, but nothing overly major ([[JerkAss Snipe]] is fast but fragile, and his magma stage can hurt him too, [[TheBrute Violent Boar]] is strong but slow, [[TheDragon Freya]] and [[BigBad Katana]] both have stages that hamper their effectiveness as well). But then, between the first set and the second set of the above, comes [[spoiler:[[TheJuggernaut Jameson]], the final Gate Keeper]]. The problem with [[spoiler:Jameson]] is that he doesn't act like a proper robo, instead fighting more like a vehicle: it doesn't flinch when hit, it doesn't go down, and it plays keep-away in order to shoot you dead. And it's VERY good at shooting you dead. Odds are good you'll have to adopt a radically diffrent strategy to fight it. Even worse if you used Soulboost, as [[spoiler:after fighting and subduing the big robo, you get to fight a second (slightly easier) one]]. |
| 61 | ** From the Gamecube game, recurring boss Rahu will make you weep whenever you see him appear. He deals enough damage to kill you in three or four hits, whereas his defenses will make you play a game you cannot win. He's so bad that the final battle is a three versus one battle with you, Harry, and Marcia versus Rahu, and you're either coming out of it with you being the last one standing, or everyone is going to be down to their last 100 health if that. |
| 62 | * Most of the bosses in the ''VideoGame/DistortedTravesty'' Series could qualify. However the Shroud Lord far eclipses all the others in the first game. The third game also has more than its fair share of ThatOneBoss, however the first true nightmare the player is likely to encounter is the reaper. How hard it he? Well, [[https://youtu.be/q1SOnYpxFRw?t=22m26s this montage]] will give you some idea. |
| 63 | * ''VideoGame/{{Drakengard 2}}'': |
| 64 | ** Yaha and his gnomes from. When there aren't a whole lot of noisy gnomes attacking Nowe en masse, the floor randomly lights up with circles that produce highly damaging, nearly impossible to dodge stalagmites. To make it worse, the game actively tricks you with this fight. Each of your characters gets a damage buff against specific types of enemies. Through dialogue, Yaha and your party member Urick establish that they have a history together, and Urick gets a bonus against monster-type enemies (the gnomes being a palette swap of goblins). Problem? The gnomes are magical-type. [[SquishyWizard Manah]] is the one who gets the buff. Against a group of monsters that think nothing of swarming all over her and demolishing her very small health bar. And once that's over, there's the giant gnome/rock monster thing itself... with a tendency for overly powerful attacks, including one that is nearly impossible to dodge. Rinse and repeat until you kill it. Ugh. |
| 65 | ** Gismor also qualifies. Instead of staying within weapon-range like a nice evil entity, he either jumps around the four platforms [[InsurmountableWaistHeightFence that you cannot reach because they are about three feet away from the edges of the cross-shaped walkway that you can stay on, even though your party members can jump about twice their height]], or stands at one of the four arms of the walkway and shoots lasers at you that you have to move in a specific pattern to avoid being killed by. While on the platforms, he fires magical energy balls at you that, if you manage to break them, give you a magical boost, but are about as easy to hit as Fire Keese. And you need magic, because you have to hit him with magic to get him to move to the walkway. |
| 66 | ** The [[{{Videogame/Drakengard3}} third game]]'s TrueFinalBoss. Usually, a TFB shouldn't be allowed on this page; however, this one manages to succeed thanks to the fact that it's a several-minute-long RhythmGame [[UnexpectedGameplayChange that comes out of nowhere if you didn't play the first game]] and insta-kills you at the first mistake, thus forcing you to do it all over again. Then it proceeds to [[CameraScrew screw with the camera]] in the later stages to mess with your timing with motion sickness. Oh, and you have to perform the last button inputs as the screen turns dark and the ending dialogue starts ''on top of'' the audio cues. [[LetsPlay/TheDarkId Trolled By Cavia]], indeed. |
| 67 | * ''VideoGame/DynamiteHeaddy'' has a few tough bosses near the end, but Izayoi/Nasty Gatekeeper is That One Boss for two reasons: The traditional reason; she's hard. She has a lot of deadly moves and she uses them very fast. Every time you hit her, she strikes at you five times at hyper speed. It's nearly impossible to avoid if you don't know what you're doing, and still pretty tough if you do. Headcase (your source of powerups), when he is there, is spinning around wildly in the nasty gatekeepers grip. Most bosses, while perhaps on the hard side, can hardly begin to prepare you for this fight. So even if it's not the hardest, it definitely sticks out. |
| 68 | * ''VideoGame/EternalDarkness'' has the essence guardian. Immune to gunfire, too far away to stab, and shoots various projectiles at you. You have to dig in and shoot magickal attacks at him, in a certain timed inteval. At three points he creates and shrinks a barrier till you're within stomping distance, and stomping is an insta kill. |
| 69 | * ''Franchise/FullMetalAlchemist'' games: |
| 70 | ** Near the end of ''[[VideoGame/FullmetalAlchemistAndTheBrokenAngel The Broken Angel]]'', there is one of the most painful boss battles in the game. It consists of a revisit to the three chimera bosses you fought individually earlier in the game: the Behemoth, the Griffin, and the Serpent. Now by themselves, these guys weren't so bad, but fighting all three at once is beyond ridiculous. The Behemoth takes very little damage at a time and has the capability to heal itself, and also fires homing projectiles. The Griffin spends most of its time out of your reach, flying around above the arena and dropping a constant stream of fireballs. Meanwhile the Serpent enjoys playing a game of Lethal Whack-A-Mole with you as it randomly pops up from the pools of water situated around the arena and using a flurry of attacks to ensure that coming near it will take a large chunk off your health. It goes without saying that this fight is a living hell for the player. |
| 71 | ** Pride in ''[[VideoGame/FullmetalAlchemistDualSympathy Dual Sympathy]]''. He's not too much trouble most of the time, but when you play as Roy... |
| 72 | ** In ''[[VideoGame/FullmetalAlchemist2CurseOfTheCrimsonElixir Curse of the Crimson Elixir]]'', the second time you fight The Phantom/[[spoiler: Elma's "chimera" form]]. She never ''stays still'' and will more than happily dance around Ed's attacks then kick combo him in the head. She also takes little damage from attacks (even max level alchemy bombs} and at around half-health begins to summon several giant golems that fire projectiles all over the battlefield. Making it very easy for poor Ed to be juggled to death via BeamSpam. |
| 73 | * ''VideoGame/GhostsNGoblins'': The second last boss. His missile weapon is easy enough to deal with - it's more of a nuisance, but he has a charge attack with an unforgiving hitbox. And because you have to fight him with the short range shield weapon you have to get nice and close to him, making his charge very difficult to dodge if you're to have any hope of hitting him. He can also block attacks. (and if you die, it's all the way back to the start of the level). Oh, and there's two of him! |
| 74 | * Hunting down and killing Pulaski in ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas''. When you start the mission, the car you came in (assuming you came to the starting point by car) will usually have vanished. Pulaski drives a Buffalo, a very fast and durable sports car, while you're stuck with a weird looking off road car that handles like crap. To even get Pulaski to get out of his car, you have to wreck it by either making it flip over via ramming or pumping it full of lead with a drive-by. Even when Pulaski finally bails, he shoots you with a friggin' '''Desert Eagle''', the most powerful handgun in the game which can knock you down. If he knocks you down with it, he'll keep shooting at you until you're dead. Oh, and his health is sky high, requiring a lot of firepower to take him down. Although it is possible to run him over or use explosives, usually your car is near a total wreck by then and Pulaski's gun can bring it to a near total explosion, forcing you to bail. |
| 75 | * ''VideoGame/GundamBattleUniverse'' doesn't have annoying bosses but some of the Extra missions will make you cringe. The two most famous ones being having to face 3 Psycho Gundams who surround you and will kill you instantly if not dodged and the other is to carry 5 boxes of goods amongst respawning weak mooks as well as the Lanfressia who will ignore flinching damage and always activates its SP attack. If you want the S rank and operator limit unlocked, you have do this. |
| 76 | * In the SNES game ''VideoGame/IllusionOfGaia'', the debates rages about which is worse: [[WakeUpCallBoss the first boss]], or [[TimeLimitBoss the]] married [[DualBoss vampires]]. |
| 77 | * The spiritial successor to ''VideoGame/IllusionOfGaia'', ''VideoGame/{{Terranigma}}'', has Bloody Mary. Unless you're several levels higher than you're supposed to be at that point in the game, your weapons only deal around 1-4 points of damage to her and she needs hundreds of attacks to go down. That said, she is quite vulnerable to [[OutsideTheBoxTactic magic]]. Which would make things easier if it wasn't for the fact that she is the ''[[GuideDangIt only boss in the game you can use magic against at all.]]'' |
| 78 | * ''VideoGame/IWannaBeTheBoshy'', being a OneHitPointWonder game, is understandably tough by itself and none of its bosses are easy at all, but even among those there's one that's ungodly awful even for this game's standards... ''Sonic The Hedgehog'', who is the 5th boss in the game (out of 11, plus two optional bosses). The fight starts out simple enough, but after taking a bit of damage, Sonic will transform into Super Sonic, the ground you're on will become a mere small platform and then he starts flying around like a drunk maniac following your every move. What makes this boss particularly horrendous is that unlike other bosses in this game which usually have set attack patterns that the player is able to memorize after a while, most of the attacks Sonic does are unpredictable to the point of feeling completely randomized. Basically, during his flight he is constantly locked in on you, meaning you have to jump out of the way at the right time, otherwise magnet physics kick in and Sonic will just kill you. It lasts approximately 20 seconds, which feels more like an eternity. After the flight, Sonic then follows with two difficult but more bearable attacks, after which the flight section starts again. Finally, as if the idiotically programmed flying movements of Sonic weren't enough to push even the most patient players to the brink, during the whole flight you have Dr. Eggman dropping bombs on the platform from his Eggmobile. The bombs land slowly, but they make an already frustrating fight even more so. Once they land, the blast radius is strangely bigger and lasts longer than it appears to be, leaving you wondering how you died when you were sure you dodged the bomb correctly. And remember, this all happens ''while'' Sonic is flying and all you have is the tiny platform. This entire fight is an overly intense test of your patience, precision and luck done in the worst way possible. |
| 79 | * ''VideoGame/JakIIRenegade'': |
| 80 | ** Baron Praxis is genuinely extremely hard (even for [[NintendoHard this game]]). What makes things worse is that he's the first boss you fight. |
| 81 | ** The fight against [[spoiler: Krew]] is also unforgiving, even given the fact that it takes place close to game's end. It opens by siccing a ''lot'' of his clones on you while hovering out of your reach. You have to defeat all of his clones before even having chance to damage him. Mind you he will be shooting at you while he is vulnerable, making damaging him difficult. And the clones? They only chase you, but the fact they're charged with electricity makes punching them impossible, and there is a lot of them, making it easy for them to surround you and damage you. They also become faster and more numerous for each fight phase. Thankfully the crates with ammo respawn, so you can easily restore ammo for all of your guns, but unfortunately [[InfinityPlusOneSword Peace Maker]] isn't that much effective -- the Scatter Gun is better because of knockback, giving you much needed breathing room. |
| 82 | * Every boss in ''VideoGame/LaMulana'' not named Amphisbaena has been accused of this, but most are actually reasonable with the right sub-weapon. The only two serious candidates are [[LivingStatue Sakit]] and [[CuteMonsterGirl Tiamat]]. |
| 83 | ** Sakit is the boss of the second field, and a big step up from the laughable Amphisbaena. He stomps back and forth on the screen, dropping rocks on you and stopping to either use a RocketPunch or shoot magic at you. The only way to damage him is to run up his arm when he uses the rocket punch and attack his face. Hope you went into the Temple of the Sun and found the Knife, otherwise you're just going to be CherryTapping with the whip. To top it off, he's immune to all subweapons. |
| 84 | ** Tiamat is the boss of the Dimensional Corridor, the penultimate boss in the game. Unlike Sakit, you can't sequence break around her and come back overequipped; you fight Tiamat at full power, and she's a nightmare. She constantly generates bats, and attacks with her tail and her PrehensileHair. She's also extraordinarily hard to hit with subweapons, so your Pistol shots that you ground for are probably going to go to waste unless you have incredible timing. If you have the [=Castlevania/Mahjong=] Wizard ROM combo and the Mace, it's a challenging fight; without those, it's murderous. |
| 85 | ** The remake changes things up a bit. Sakit retains his ThatOneBoss status in this game and is only made worse because the knife is a far less reliable way to hit him this time around, but Tiamat is actually quite a bit easier due to having a far less irritating strategy tacked onto her, to the point where she's almost like a completely different boss fight. That said, Baphomet (who in the original was almost a BreatherBoss) is more than happy to take Tiamat's place as ThatOneBoss in the remake, as she goes from a sitting duck that waits for you to drop bombs on her to a nightmarish marathon of a boss fight consisting of two forms and a great many hard-to-avoid lightning bolts. She's considered by many to be the second hardest fight in the game, behind only the final boss itself. |
| 86 | * ''VideoGame/LaMulana2'', being a sequel to ''VideoGame/LaMulana'', naturally has a few that qualify. |
| 87 | ** Jormungand, the fourth boss, is not the world serpent that eats its own tail, but a Lokapalan soldier riding on a bike that resembles the world serpent. This fight is the unholy union of Ellmac and Palenque. Just to even fight him you have to use the Pochette Key or you get crushed and killed in one hit. Once you do that, you'll have to contend with his attacks. While his gun attacks do decent damage, the biggest danger is just getting run over, as he has a huge hit box and often moves from one side of the screen to the other without warning. Worst of all, he spends a lot of time behind you, and Lumisa can't attack behind her during the fight [[spoiler: although you can get underneath Jormungand and use earth spears or the flare gun]]. While he does follow a very strict pattern and all of his attacks are avoidable once you know them, it may take you many attempts to figure him out. |
| 88 | ** Anu, fought in the Ancient Chaos, is another fight that's visually impressive but quite difficult. The biggest challenge with Anu is that he spends much of his time in the air and is only vulnerable to melee attacks for a brief moment when he dive bombs you. Flare guns work, but his own ship works as a shield to protect him from the blast, meaning you have to hit him when he tilts to one side so the explosion will tag him. While he's doing all of this he's littering the arena with rolling spiked balls and projectiles. Good luck! |
| 89 | * The third Owata clone in the [[http://blog53.fc2.com/k/king75/file/owata.swf The Life Ending Adventure]]. The first one is easy, the second one is pretty hard but the third one is almost unbeatable. The fact that he heals when he's low on HP and that you are the OneHitPointWonder don't help at all. The whole game is obscenely hard, no wonder ''VideoGame/IWannaBeTheGuy'' was based on this. |
| 90 | * Bomamba from ''VideoGame/NiGHTSJourneyOfDreams'' is a fight in which you have to tilt a board to get a bunch of cat heads into holes. Sounds easy enough, but the physics are utter rubbish and if the cat head twitches going into the hole it rolls straight over. And, on top of that, you can't pull the board towards you and have to constantly circle the board... by which point the cats have moved to another position and it starts anew. To make matters even worse, there's a ''time limit'', and if time elapses you automatically lose. |
| 91 | * [=TeaTea=] from stage 2 of Myifee's storyline in ''VideoGame/NinetyNineNights'' is the living embodiment of the "bottleneck to make sure you levelled" version. If you try to go at him at level 2, he's essentially impossible to beat, your attacks just barely chipping at his health while he decimates you. If you take the time to kill everything and get up to level 3, your cool new sword and improved stats will make short work of him. |
| 92 | * ''VideoGame/MarvelsSpiderMan2'' |
| 93 | ** [[BloodKnight Kraven The Hunter]] finally manages to set a trap to get his fight against the [[OOCIsSeriousBusiness bloodthirsty, Black-Suited Spider-Man]], (By [[spoiler:kidnapping Miles Morales]]) who he deems a WorthyOpponent, and when the fight starts, he’s no joke. The first thing you will notice in phase one is that Kraven can simply air cancel out of your air combos. A thing no boss or enemy could do beforehand. When phase two starts, he makes use of speedy-to-slow attack strings. Various crush[[note]]Unique attacks that must be dodged, or they kill you[[/note]] and heavy[[note]]Attacks that cannot be dodged and must be parried[[/note]] attacks, and a giant bell; captilizing the symbiote's weakness to loud noises. Spider-man is stunned in intervals of 1 second, efficiency making you fresh meat for Kraven. Fail to stop the bell in time and he transitions into his more aggressive patterns. Such as a smoke bomb to reposition himself, aiming his sniper scope which takes a deceptively long time to fire, with a tight dodge window, and takes out enough health to effectively one-shot you if you took a small bit of damage beforehand. Or throwing an axe at you. Impossible to dodge effectively with the bell ringing. Later into to fight he disappears and calls in robotic hunter dogs, which attack fast, have light SuperArmor and can prone themselves to disable your symbiote abilities. He comes in later to attack in unison with them, and if you piss him off enough, he’ll ring that damn bell again! |
| 94 | ** After winning, Spider-Man is ready to kill Kraven... [[spoiler:until Miles breaks free and stops him. Enraging the already corrupted hero, then attacks Miles]] While he’s more susceptible to combos. He has insane range. All the time. Wiht his tentacles, he'll unleash a wave of basic, crush, and heavy attacks with no discernible pattern at all ranges, making it suicidal to stand still or not trying to find a way to stun him ([[spoiler:Such as the bell]]) Dance in the air too long and he has a crush attack with infinite range and can yank you whenever you are, legitimately one-shotting you. Chances are he charged it offscreen too! |
| 95 | * ''VideoGame/{{Okami}}'': |
| 96 | ** If you don't know the strategy, then Ninetails also qualifies. Making him split into his nine smaller bodies isn't hard, but then you have to defeat each of those bodies themselves. If you get hit by them once, though, the other eight will come at you and combo attack you until they reform into Ninetails again without the slightest window for attack. Also, there's invincible flying skulls spitting orbs at you the whole time and any damage taken is healed upon reforming into Ninetails, so you can't do some and then pick up where you left off. Only if you start the assault with a glaive swing before they get close enough to hit you can you start comboing them and doing damage... not helped that on the Wii version glaive-charging is extremely unpredictable. |
| 97 | ** As soon as you enter the frigid tundra that is Kamui, you are faced with a mysterious man in a mask... Oki. He's much harder than previous bosses (and he happens to be only a MiniBoss), especially his attack where he shoots ice shards at you that is tricky to dodge (and if you're frozen, you're so vulnerable you can't even pause). And when you finally get his health down to zero, he goes OneWingedAngel by turning into [[MirrorMatch a wolf]]. You've dealt with canine warriors before, but none of them can create copies of themselves that can tag-team, throw ''bigger'' ice shards at you, or hit you with a {{BFS}}. Also, while you ''can'' block said sword swings with a sub-reflector, even if you get the timing right you can't perform the Izuna Drop counter-attack on Oki. |
| 98 | * Several bosses after the first boss in the [[NoExportForYou Japan-only]] 1987 game ''VideoGame/PocketZaurus'' have completely different gimmicks to fight them. |
| 99 | ** Great King Tutankham, the boss of the Ancient Egypt stage. The fight takes place in a chamber that consists of three giant sarcophagi of King Tut. The sarcophagi attack with erratic projectiles that move in completely random directions and are impossible to predict. The sarcophagi cannot be damaged by any of your regular attacks. How do you deal damage to Tutankam? By placing items that look like a baby pacifier into the mouths of the sarcophagi. Did we mention that the erratic projectiles are ''shot out of the mouths''? Additionally, with all three sarcophagi attacking at the start of the fight, the screen becomes filled with erratic projectiles, making it very easy to take damage. Compounding the difficulty of this boss fight, in order to successfully place a pacifier into a sarcophagus mouth, you have to ''line up the pacifier with the mouth almost exactly'' and release it via the attack button; simply throwing the pacifier into the mouth from a distance will not work. To make matters even worse, taking damage while holding a pacifier will make you to drop the pacifier, forcing you to run over and retrieve it, possibly taking damage from the projectiles in the process. If you drop a pacifier and it goes off-screen, sucks to be you, as you have to wait for a new one to respawn in a random location in the room. The most difficult sarcophagus to "pacify" is the one on the far right; it is very easy to miss your mark and throw the pacifier off-screen, forcing you to wait for a new one to respawn. Finally, the icing on the cake of this frustrating boss fight: you have a time limit, and if you take too long in the fight, the boss will kill you instantly, no matter now much health you have, whether you are Super Zaurus or not, and no matter how many sarcophagi you destroy, necessitating starting the whole fight over again from the beginning. |
| 100 | ** Emperor Green Zaurus, the boss of the Age of Gods stage. Green Zaurus resembles a large two-headed snake. The boss fight begins with him offscreen, summoning water geysers that are ''completely untelegraphed'' and appear in completely random locations on the screen. Unless you are constantly moving and are aware that his geysers appear at set times during this phase, you '''will get hit'''. After the initial water geyser attack, Green Zaurus enters the room from the bottom and begins shooting fireballs at you. Fortunately, his fireballs can be destroyed by your boomerangs, but like Great King Tutankham, none of your regular attacks can hurt him. You have to wait until his fireballs hit one of the sconces on either side of him; which generates an item that looks like a Christmas wreath. Grabbing a wreath is an exercise in frustration and tedium, since the wreaths follow a different physics routine than the fireballs (being that the wreaths arc much more slowly than the fireballs), so you have to clear the fireballs out in order to grab the wreaths if you do not want to take damage. The wreaths are the only thing that hurt the boss, and you need a total of six wreaths, three for each of his two heads, to defeat him. You must throw the wreaths directly at his heads, otherwise, they will pass harmlessly through his body and necks, wasting a valuable wreath and forcing you to go through the extreme danger of retrieving another wreath. The main reason why players would want to minimize damage against Green Zaurus is, if this stage is the penultimate stage before the FinalBoss, they will be taken to the final boss fight ''without being able to recover any health'' after a boss fight in which taking damage is almost guaranteed. |
| 101 | ** King Bug the Great, the boss of the Future City stage, when you are regular Hashimoto Zaurus. As Super Zaurus, you can easily cut through King Bug's mooks and damage him in his weak spot. However, without the fast boomerangs that Super Zaurus has, good luck on destroying his mooks before he hides his weak spot. King Bug dies with only three direct hits, but with your slow boomerangs in regular form, actually landing a hit is extremely difficult. |
| 102 | * [[http://www.gamespot.com/ds/adventure/thechroniclesofnarniaprincecaspian/review.html GameSpot's review]] of ''[[Literature/TheChroniclesOfNarnia Prince Caspian]]'' for the DS had such a reaction with a literal MamaBear boss: (really ''had'' -- the version in that link is different, since the site [[http://www.gamespot.com/news/blogs/review-blog/909185210/26396802/fyi-prince-caspian-review.html redid it for errors]], such as "overlooking some features") |
| 103 | -->''A note on mother bear: She's like [[KillerRabbit the rabbit from]] ''Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail''...[[BearsAreBadNews but a bear]]. She can kill most of your party members with one shot, and like most giant predators, she doesn't need to take much of a break in between killing children. If ''When Animals Attack'' were a game, it would be a lot like the mother bear fight.'' |
| 104 | * In ''VideoGame/PrinceOfPersiaTheTwoThrones'', this overlaps with the DualBoss. You fight two baddies, one who carries a sword and parries all attacks, and one who carries an axe and is too heavily armored to hurt. In order to damage them, you have to first attack Sword Guy ineffectively until Axe Guy leaps at you from behind. Dodge so the axe gets stuck in the ground, giving you a very short window to run around behind Axe Guy and hit him, once. Repeat this for many hits and eventually it will trigger an ActionCommands scene that will let you do a small amount of actual damage to the bosses. Then do the whole repetitive thing over again, twice, to kill them. If you fail to dodge the axe, you take 50% damage and get knocked down. If you miss the timing on the runaround, Sword Guy will unblockably combo you to death. God help you if you screw up the Action Command. Oh, and the surrounding RingOfFire that hurts you and not the enemies. And that this whole thing happens immediately after the chariot-racing ScrappyLevel, without a save point in between? And the level isn't even over once you beat them. Yay. |
| 105 | * Any boss battle with [[spoiler:Shahdee]] in ''VideoGame/PrinceOfPersiaWarriorWithin'' could be considered ThatOneBoss, simply because if you didn't follow the strict pattern of the fight the game gave you to the tee, the boss would take half your life bar away in a flash. |
| 106 | * ''VideoGame/PrinceOfPersia2008''[='s=] downloadable epilogue has the final battle against [[spoiler:Elika's father]] in the Ballroom. Players may better remember it as ELIKA! THE THRONE, THE THRONE! |
| 107 | * The Hulking Lungfish from ''VideoGame/{{Psychonauts}}.'' FeedItABomb. Fine; not a problem. However, the fact that it's a CowardlyBoss who forces you to go through a long, difficult AdvancingWallOfDoom segment between attempts to damage it makes the fight against it tedious, difficult, and annoying. Luckily, beating it is well worth it, for the [[AttackOfThe50FootWhatever awesome, Godzilla-movie parody level you get to play afterwards.]] |
| 108 | %%** The Butcher. The second time. |
| 109 | * ''Franchise/SilentHill'': |
| 110 | ** ''VideoGame/SilentHill2'': |
| 111 | *** The Twin Pyramid Heads, particularly on Hard difficulty. |
| 112 | *** [[spoiler:Eddie]], partially due to being the only enemy in the game that uses a gun. |
| 113 | ** The God in ''VideoGame/SilentHill3'', while fairly easy on Normal, becomes ThatOneBoss on the Hard and [[HarderThanHard Extreme]]. She has a ton more HP, requiring you to use your limited ammo and weapons strategically (melee attacking when her head is down during the first half), and once her HP is half depleted, her firewave attacks become much faster and deadlier. Prepare to die many times before figuring this out. |
| 114 | ** For many, Scarlet from ''VideoGame/SilentHillHomecoming'' also qualifies -- not necessarily due to difficulty, but because numerous copies of the game have a bug that makes the fight {{Unwinnable}}. |
| 115 | * ''VideoGame/SlyCooper'' has a few bosses that fit the bill: |
| 116 | ** First is Mz. Ruby from ''VideoGame/SlyCooperAndTheThieviusRaccoonus''. Her fight consists of a long, drawn-out and irritating sequence of [[PressXToNotDie musical rhythm minigames,]] made more frustrating by the odd camera angles and varying projectile speeds. And remember, unless you've packed a horseshoe or two for the fight, [[OneHitPointWonder one hit and you have to start the current section all over again.]] It's bad enough on the original [=PS2=] release, but the HD Collection on the [=PS3=] makes it several times worse, as thanks to a glitch, the visual button cues are ''horribly'' desynchronized from the background music. Argh! |
| 117 | ** The honor of being the hardest boss in the game belongs to Clockwerk, the final boss. His first form is simple enough; just circle to avoid the energy blasts, and shoot whichever part Carmelita electrifies. After he crashes into the lava, he rises like a phoenix and things get difficult. You have to shoot the electrified body parts as before, but this time he launches electric rings that zap you unless you place yourself perfectly in the middle. Maneuvering through the rings is frustrating enough, but even after you empty his lifebar for the second time, there's still a third stage, and it's the worst of the lot. Now you have to run across some rocks and debris over a field of lava, dodging vertical lighting blasts and rotating security lasers on your way to Clockwerk's crashed form. And the worst part? 1-3 hits (depending on how many horseshoes you picked up) and you have to start the fight over from the first phase. |
| 118 | ** And in case you were hoping you wouldn't have to deal with Clockwerk any more, [[VideoGame/Sly2BandOfThieves the second game]] proves you wrong in the form of [[spoiler:Clock-La, the merger between Clockwerk and [[ChronicBackstabbingDisorder Neyla]]]]. The first phase is yet another aerial turret section, where [[spoiler:she]] constantly swoops around, and your shots don't do as much damage as they should. [[spoiler:She]] spams missiles and can use an attack that can take off ''a third of your health'' in one shot unless you shoot [[spoiler:her]] enough, and with [[spoiler:her]] constant swooping, realize how tough it can be to deal with. Once you somehow get [[spoiler:her]] health down, [[spoiler:she]] brings out the electric rings, and you have to shoot them to not get zapped for heavy damage... and not shoot them again by accident, which turns them back on. But when you're about to take [[spoiler:her]] down, you then have to deal with the most frustrating platforming sequence in the game in order to get to [[spoiler:her]] again, and messing up starts that sequence all over. |
| 119 | ** Also from Sly 2 is Rajan, who has [[DamageSpongeBoss absolutely massive health]] (even though you are playing as Murray, your attacks still do little damage to him), has damaging attacks (which are also hard to avoid due to Murray's size and slow speed), and summons goons to help him fight which also do a lot of damage if they hit you. |
| 120 | ** ''VideoGame/Sly3HonorAmongThieves'': |
| 121 | *** Don Octavio, who is quite difficult for the first boss. Think an old guy like him would be slow and easy to take out? [[LightningBruiser WRONG.]] You can't even hit him unless you flood the arena with tar; try to punch him when he's not in it and he counters by jumping on your head. You've also got to deal with his rushing flurries of punches and [[ShockwaveStomp ground pounds]] as well. Even though Murray has a good deal of health, he'll easily chop it off. Even when slowed, most of the time punching him will knock him out of the tar, forcing you to chase and deal with his strong attacks. And in the second phase, he gets a pretty strong projectile attack to deal with as well. And if you lose? Back to the very beginning for you. But then there's the bonus mission where you have to defeat him under a ''very'' strict time limit. That's no fun. |
| 122 | *** The game also has the battle with General Tsao, a tough two-part battle. The first half is fought under some quite ''strange'' mechanics; jumping once causes you to soar without stopping, and double jumping changes your course. If it sounds easy, wait until you have to do tricky maneuvers to hit Tsao without hitting his spinning shield. He also shoots energy projectiles at you. Then comes the second half. You're on the ground, but things aren't much easier. Tsao will use his spinning shield to counter your attacks. He also can punch the ground to send waves of undead hands to chase you, which require you to climb the bamboo shoots to stop them... and guess what both of your attacks can easily destroy? He also shoots homing dragon heads, which cause a nasty InterfaceScrew and make it hard to see what's going on. If you don't have the Push Attack, it's a brutal fight. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, the Challenge version requires you to beat both phases (seperately) ''with only half your max HP.'' |
| 123 | *** The swordfighting duel with [=LeFwee=]. Until you learn how to fight, you will get ''stomped''... and when you get the hang of it, it's still a monotonous 3-stage battle where losing forces you to start all over. |
| 124 | ** There's Grizz in [[VideoGame/SlyCooperThievesInTime the fourth game]]. He's invincible for most of the fight, and he skates around the arena while slamming you with a constant barrage of attacks that ''hurt''. Shockwaves that freeze you, dashing into you at high speed ("HERE COMES THE GRIZZ"), sending icicles smashing into the floor, and sending out a spreading wave of ice blocks, he's got them all. All you can do is dodge his attacks until he starts a new attack, which takes ''forever'' on the third phase. Here he summons a circle of monoliths around him, and you have to punch ice blocks in the circle... but they take a lot of hits, and all this time you're being barraged by icicles (which actually have a blast radius) and shockwaves. Take too long and he shoots out the monoliths, doing lots of damage. When you ''do'' get them all? You're not done yet, as you have to go through a ''memory/rhythm minigame''. It's easy at first, but then the inputs start being blanked out. Mess up just once on one of those and you have to go through the whole sequence again. And you have to do all this ''[[RuleOfThree three]]'' times before he goes down. Your only saving grace is that checkpoints are after each time you deal damage. Oh, and he's at the end of a long stage. Have fun. |
| 125 | * Mysterio from the first Platform/{{Playstation}} ''[[VideoGame/SpiderMan2000 Spider-Man]]'' game. The method to beating Mysterio was straightforward and obvious enough, but the twitchy controls made shooting your webbing difficult at best, particularly while avoiding Mysterio's attacks. [[AnticlimaxBoss Hilariously subverted]] in the [[VideoGame/SpiderMan2 second game]] based on the movies. Mysterio's health bar fills up... three times, and then [[spoiler:you defeat him with one punch]] |
| 126 | * Ultra Mega Mega Man, the final boss of the ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' FPS for the Nintendo 64 and [=PlayStation=]. Once you get its health down, it starts healing and it's very hard to stop it. |
| 127 | * [[spoiler:Andross]] in ''VideoGame/StarFoxAdventures.'' [[spoiler:It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the game up until that point is largely based on on-foot, Zelda-style action, and suddenly he takes the [[UnexpectedGameplayChange shooting segments]] from the starts of the levels and makes them the focal point of his fight.]] One thing that makes this fight way worse than it should be is [[spoiler:his sucking attack. It's nigh unavoidable, as opposed to the previous games in which it was an utter joke. You have to SPAM barrel rolls while boosting (you read that right, ''boosting'', not braking) as much as possible in order to slow down ''juuust'' enough to not get sucked in.]] Normally this wouldn't be an issue. And it isn't... later in the fight. If he gets you with it while he's still in the first form, [[spoiler:whichever hand you destroyed, if either at all, regenerates, so the whole first phase just resets. And unless you're SERIOUSLY skilled and can destroy both hands in one go, you're going to have to deal with this attack at least once.]] |
| 128 | * Fighting the Emperor himself in ''[[VideoGame/SuperStarWars Super Return of the Jedi]]''. He spams Force Lightning ALL OVER THE PLACE, which destroys the walkways you're fighting on. It can get to the point where there's barely any flooring left to stand on and it's also possible to fall do your death AFTER killing the emperor! |
| 129 | * ''VideoGame/TransformersArmada'': |
| 130 | ** Starscream. Even on the ground he's insanely fast when he's not walking straight at you. When he takes to the air and starts strafing it's hard enough to figure out what direction he's coming from, let alone actually landing a hit on him. With the right combination of Mini-Cons you can get the weaponry necessary to beat him without snapping your controller...which would be great if he wasn't the ''second boss of the game''. |
| 131 | ** Cyclonus. The battle begins atop an ancient pyramid, and one of Cyclonus' first acts is an unblockable (and probably unavoidable) throw that usually sends you sailing ''off'' the pyramid for massive damage. He follows this up with a strafing attack that eats up your life, and seems to be unavoidable for everybody [[CharacterSelectForcing except Hot Shot]], who can avoid the attack by transforming and hiding underwater. |
| 132 | * ''[[VideoGame/UltimateSpiderMan2005 Ultimate Spider-Man]]'' has quite a lot of these. |
| 133 | ** The second fight against Venom and when you fight Electro is awfully hard. Green Goblin, who looks like the Hulk on fire, is hard considering you have to dodge fire balls and while doing that you'll sometime miss your chance to harm him. You then have to go into a flaming church to fight him and it's hard. |
| 134 | ** The hardest of all is Carnage. You play as Venom but he fights similar to you. When you beat him up enough he hides behind a gate that is very hard to move and then he goes into another one. He also fights hard and can heal again afterwards. |
| 135 | ** Another bad one is the fight against the Beetle as Venom. You're in a room that is ''filled'' with traps that can drastically take down Eddie's health, and the little bastard can quickly fly out of range from your attacks. To top it all off, this is the only boss fight Venom has where there aren't any random humans running around to eat and allow you to regain your health, and since Venom's health is always going down the entire game, it means that this fight essentially has you against the clock for the whole battle. |
| 136 | ** In the N64 ''ComicBook/SpiderMan'' game, Venom is ridiculously hard considering that he's only the second boss in the game. Walk too far away from him, and he pulls you in with an unblockable attack; Get too close to him, he grabs you with an unblockable attack. He has twice as much health as the player, and one of the only too meager health pick-ups is under a larger container which takes a few seconds to lift -- meaning that if you try to grab it, he'll probably be able to attack you. |
| 137 | ** Another Ultimate Spider-Man example comes from the iPhone game Ultimate Spider-Man: Total Mayhem. Most of the game is a cakewalk, but only because it's practically refreshment following The Rhino, ''the very second boss''. Most of the later bosses have the benefit of letting out health power ups every few punches, but with Rhino, there is no such mercy. You can expect a third of gameplay time going down the drain as you face three stages of relentless smackdown from the brute and his ridiculously powerful charges. |
| 138 | ** ''VideoGame/SpiderManWebOfShadows'', the console version, brings us Electro. The fight comes not long after another tough boss, Venom, and the player is probably hoping for some nice [[BreatherLevel breather missions]] afterwards, but instead, your friendly neighborhood electrocharged criminal crashes the party and starts spazzing out on everyone. Too much of the fight relies on you web-slinging and chasing Electro through the city; while web-slinging is fun when you don't have to be too precise with it, this fight reveals just how imperfect the mechanic is, especially because you lose and have to start over from the nearest checkpoint if he gets too far away. And you can't easily track him with your eyes or spider-sense, because he simply teleports from place to place. When you finally do get to fight him, prepare for a tough, confusing light-show that can easily camouflage attacks. Perhaps the worst part is that after all this, Spidey isn't even the one who gets to land the final blow. |
| 139 | [[/folder]] |
| 140 | |
| 141 | [[folder:Others Part 2]] |
| 142 | * ''VideoGame/AceCombat'' gives us a few examples: |
| 143 | ** ''VideoGame/AceCombatZeroTheBelkanWar'' has Alberto "Espada One" Lopez. Don't laugh at the fact that he's "only" piloting a starting plane, for he can be very hard to hit and can outmaneuver {{Bigger Stick}}s quite easily. Real horrorshow, that one. |
| 144 | ** ''VideoGame/AceCombatXSkiesOfDeception'' gives us Alect Squadron in Fenrirs. Think Alect Squadron in "only" [=S-32s=] was tough? Think Fenrirs with relatively nooby pilots were challenging? Try them together. In addition to being fiendishly agile, their InvisibilityCloak meant that you could be fired on from seemingly nowhere, making dodging difficult, and you couldn't get a stable lock-on since the lock would break every now and then, so even [=QAAMs=] had rather reduced performance. You did have the option to destroy the generator powering their invis, but that did not affect their lethality. Fortunately, once you did defeat them the rest of the mission was, even objectively instead of relatively speaking, easy. |
| 145 | ** ''VideoGame/AceCombat6FiresOfLiberation'' graces us with Ilya Pasternak in his [[MacrossMissileMassacre missile swarm hurling]] Nosferatu and a bunch of [[GoddamnedBats small drones that are pretty hard to hit]]. On top of the missile swarm attack, the Nosferatu is also capable of monster acceleration and a dime-sized turn radius which allows him to dodge a missile whenever the fuck he wants. So on higher difficulty levels, the fight consists of Ilya launching the missile swarm, and then hauling ass roadrunner style. Meanwhile, his numerous ridiculously agile drones keep you from achieving a lock quickly and fire their pea shooters at you. By the time you do get a lock, he's already turning for another pass at you. |
| 146 | ** ''VideoGame/AceCombatJointAssault'': [[spoiler: Sulejmani and his Varcolac]]. Since he's using a superplane, crazy speed and agility are a given, so that's not why he's here. There are other reasons -- He has a rear-facing machine gun that shoots down missiles at his six, so you have to somehow get in his face to hurt him if you can't use guns reliably. If you can, he goes into a second phase where he does bullshit rolls to dodge missiles; [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard Naturally, you can't do any such thing.]] Hurt him enough now and he goes into a ''third'' stage where he suddenly becomes a lot more aggressive. A lot more. To make matters worse, [[MadeOfIron he'll eat as many missiles as you needed to kill the other three guys combined and keep going.]] Piece of shit. |
| 147 | * The fights with Nigel Bloch in ''VideoGame/AgentUnderFire''. In the first one, you're on a tram rail with no cover. There's a wave of guards then Bloch comes out on the platform of the central control tower. He has perfect accuracy with his weapon, even while recoiling from being shot. Then he opens up the doors below to reveal lava that slowly damages you in a subversion of ConvectionSchmonvection. You have to take out another wave of Mooks, then use a video guided rocket launcher to take out three lights above. Go too slow, miss, or take too much damage in the fight and you gotta start all over from the beginning. |
| 148 | * ''VideoGame/{{Aquaria}}'': |
| 149 | ** Octomun definitely qualifies. The only way to defeat him is to get in close and fire at his weak point, [[spoiler: a pearl that appears ''in his mouth'',]] which brings you in range to be hit by a devastating tentacle attack. To cap that, he spawns enemies that can blind you, can darken the playfield by emitting ink, and fires a near-constant barrage of homing shots. There aren't any tricks or shortcuts, either. Ouch. |
| 150 | ** King Jelly is a horrible [[MookMaker mook spawning]] monstrosity complete with nigh unavoidable lasers and is completely invulnerable except for a very hard to hit rotating WeakSpot. The only upside is that defeating it gets you the undeniably best armor in the game. |
| 151 | * ''VideoGame/AstroBoyOmegaFactor'': |
| 152 | ** Carabs, the Stage Four boss. The SHMUP sections of this game are similar in ways to a BulletHell, except that Astro Boy's hit box is twice the size of a standard SHMUP vehicle. Carabs will take off half your life if [[CollisionDamage you touch him]], and he takes up two-thirds of the screen. Trying to dodge through him is an exercise in futility, thanks to how dodging jams up in these sections. Oh, and if you try to fly under or over him, he'll change direction to slam into you. For extra fun, do this in the all-damage-doubled Rebirth mode! |
| 153 | ** For first-time players, North can be a giant brick wall, as he seems to guard any attack, and instantly retaliates with a nasty counterattack. Even when the player figures out what to do, he's still tricky. |
| 154 | * ''VideoGame/BanjoKazooie'': Although FinalBoss fights don't normally count, the fight with Gruntilda at the end of the first game deserves a mention for presenting a massive DifficultySpike compared to the rest of the game before her, which is pretty easy overall with a few exceptions. The fight is ''five'' phases long, and while the first two phases are fairly easy, the third phase is where things really get rough. Grunty hops on her broomstick and flies overhead, tossing fireballs down on you. You can only fight her by using the flight pad and hitting her with the high-risk Beak Bomb attack using the game's wonky flying controls while she moves about and only stops to throw more fireballs at you. Even just getting a good aim at her is tough, since the flying controls make it difficult to get exactly level with her and often leaves you trying to bomb her from awkward angles and often lead to the player accidentally killing themselves by missing her and hitting the ground. In the fourth phase, she surrounds herself in an invincible force field, making you shoot eggs into holes in the bases of Jinjo statues to make them attack her, all while Grunty is raining fireballs down on you, often at seemingly random angles that can make dodging them unpredictable. In the fifth and final phase, once the Jinjonator statue shows up, she starts throwing even more fireballs and often more accurately. This makes activating the statue, which needs three eggs shot into four holes each, extremely frantic and difficult to do without getting hit many times. And if you die at any point, you have to do the whole fight over again from the beginning. |
| 155 | * ''VideoGame/BanjoTooie'': |
| 156 | ** Weldar. At the start he shoots energy balls (simple to dodge), but then he tries to suck you into his giant mouth. You shoot a grenade in him (which requires you to stand still and crouch), then he shoots some baddies at you. Beat them and then he chases you around. After that he puts an electric grid on the floor, which you must hop around on in tandem with the same moves. To add insult to injury, his BossRoom is very out of the way, and you don't (directly) get a Jiggy for defeating him. |
| 157 | ** Lord Woo Fak Fak moves quick, and unlike Mr. Patch he moves into you -- not hurting you but screwing up your aim. Hitting him becomes a matter of luck. Even worse, you fight him underwater, in a ''ridiculously'' confined boss room, making it even ''more'' impossible to put enough distance between you and him to manuever effectively. And in Replay Mode, you don't get the luxury of cheats or the infinite-ammo and easier-to-control Submarine. |
| 158 | ** Mr Patch, in all of his incarnations. In ''Banjo-Tooie'', his battle requires you to be flying in the air, picking off his very specific weak spots with slow moving projectiles in a first-person aiming mode. His erratic movement and Kazooie's wonky flying made wasting Grenade Eggs almost inevitable, and the slow flying made dodging the [[AbnormalAmmo exploding beachballs]] a nightmare. Oh, and he gets smaller every time you hit him. ''Nuts and Bolts'' has you face him ''two'' times -- in Nutty Acres, his patches are less obvious and your plane (if you have one) won't be advanced enough to turn quickly, meaning you either have to wrestle yourself into position or slam into him too many times, and in Banjoland, dragging him into the cactus is difficult because he breaks away every time he gets a puncture and the helicopter controls (assumng you used a helicopter) are wonky-tastic. |
| 159 | ** Chili Billi or Chilly Willy, depending on whom you fight first. The first dragon is easy, but the second one is ''much'' more difficult. He will lead his shots, slide his giant tongue across the stage very fast, and the cannons you use to damage him disappear after a few uses. Plus, he has much more health than the other dragon. |
| 160 | ** The Hag 1, the final boss, is ridiculously difficult, even for a final boss. It has an absolutely enormous variety of attacks, including spinning lasers, mortars with shrapnel bursts, chasing you with a giant drill, [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs chasing you with a giant drill while spinning lasers]], spawning minions, shooting off magic blasts that use a quiz question to determine their speed, toxic gas that will kill you after your oxygen meter runs out, and a very fast rapid-fire spell. Now, you do get life upgrades and cheats (like HONEYBACK which regenerates health)...except on Replay Mode, where you have just five honeycombs and no cheats. Good luck. |
| 161 | * Any boss after Round 2 in ''Bonk's Adventure'', they're such cheap bastards you're almost guaranteed to lose a couple lives. And worse, you have to fight a BossRush of the first four bosses in Round 5. |
| 162 | * Captain Cook in ''VideoGame/{{Bonk}}'s Revenge''. The ClimaxBoss of the game, he is a [[DifficultySpike large leap in difficulty]] from first three bosses. This is the first boss to have two forms, and his second form is a big pain in the neck; you have to wait until he moves to his lower position(and shoots a deadly fireball) to jump onto and hit him, which is easier said than done without taking damage, and his attacks take off a at least a full heart with each hit. |
| 163 | * ''Dead or School'', already a somewhat [[NintendoHard challenging]] game, gives us two major examples. |
| 164 | ** The boss of [[DifficultySpike stage 2]]: The Steel Berserker Mutant. Bosses in this game tend to do a lot of damage, killing you in relatively few hits, so what makes this guy a pain is that one of his moves, a shout that creates a shockwave in a small area around him, simply does not have any tells and comes out instantly. Since most of the damage to this boss will have to be done with your melee weapon, the only reasonably safe way of fighting would be approaching while he is in the middle of his slower attacks, hacking a bit, then dodging away. This makes the fight drag on, increasing the chance you'll be tagged with some of this other attacks (including one that does have a tell but comes out so fast and has such range, it's not easy to dodge in the best of times). |
| 165 | ** And then there's the stage 5 boss: The Steel Reconnaisance Machine. |
| 166 | *** First of all, he has two phases. In the first one you need to go through a reasonably big area while using pieces of cover to avoid his attacks. This is not difficult, but any mistakes will cost a bunch of health as always. Then, from the last cover, you need to swing on some posts to reach the top of the monster. Problem 1 with that, the only time it's remotely safe to try that is when the enemy is using its laser attack, so you'll have to wait for that. Problem 2 is that, despite the laser starting from the bottom and slowly rising up, sometimes when you're in a specific post (the one you're likely to be on if you're trying to reach the top of the monster) and the laser starts firing, you'll take damage. It's only minor damage, at least, but it's something to consider because of everything else you'll have to deal with. |
| 167 | *** So you get to the top and start attacking the enemy's shield generator, but you have very little time before the boss throws you all the way back to where you started, so you have to approach again. The damage you deal is so little that you'll need to repeat the process at least [[MarathonBoss 10 times]], meaning there is a lot of opportunity to be tagged due to a mistake, as well as for the glitchy laser damage to accumulate. |
| 168 | *** Then you finally finish the first phase and get to fight the boss for real. Now you have the opposite problem: The arena is far too small. Most of it is taken by the boss, and what you have to stand on is just not enough to avoid the wide area boss attacks, even with your dodge roll. So your best option is to make it a damage race, killing the boss before you die, so you better have kept your focus throughout the entire long first phase and not lost too much HP, or you're toast. |
| 169 | * ''VideoGame/{{Descent}}'': |
| 170 | ** Many of the bosses, due to being armed with the most powerful weapons in the game on top of being accompanied by a small army of {{Mooks}}, and some of whom are {{Mook Maker}}s to boot. However, the Ice Boss from Descent II takes the cake for pure frustration. He fires homing Flash missles (which blind you) and an Omega Cannon (the strongest primary weapon in the game) which has been haxxored so that it ''also'' blinds you. Meaning that unless you stay up in the passageway leading into the BossRoom (which protects you from most of his attacks), you'll likely be flying completely blind for the battle. And he's immune to energy weapons, meaning that the only two primary weapons that even affect him are the Vulcan and Gauss cannons, for which ammo is rather limited. |
| 171 | ** The Fire Boss. Instant-kill homing Mega Missiles + super Phoenix Cannon + random teleporting + lack of cover = pain. If you wasted the cloaking device, you're fucked. |
| 172 | * Reapermon in ''VideoGame/DigimonRumbleArena''. The final boss of the game, and clearly designed to be the cheapest bastard on the face of the planet. His Grim Slasher results in two hits that cause your character to flinch, making you completely unable to avoid the ten-hit rush that immediately follows. Just to top it all off, he can (and will) follow it up with his Bone Duster, in which he causes a gout of flame to rise up from the ground and hit you another eight or so times. The worst part, however, is that this sequence of eighteen to twenty hits in three seconds will daze your character -- leaving you stunned and completely defenseless against the same combo. Which inevitably leaves you dazed once more, allowing for a permanent stunlock until dead. Projectile spam is one's best bet -- so help you God if you're playing a short-range character like Wormmon for the sake of unlockable characters. |
| 173 | * The ''VideoGame/EccoTheDolphin'' games are just plain hard in general, but the following bosses go further: |
| 174 | ** The final boss of the first game stands out less because of her own difficulty and more because if you lose, you have to repeat the ''five minute long scrolling level with no checkpoints where a wrong turn means instant death''. And, as if to further taunt you, the game gives the password to her chamber ''after the credits roll''. This was fixed in the PC port, where losing against her just starts the fight again. Also, the scrolling level was given checkpoints. |
| 175 | ** The Asterite. You have to precisely hit 4 targets out of 32 that constantly move around, if you hit anything else you have to start the sequence over. All the while it shoots lightning bolts at you and you are running out of air. It also takes at least a minute to get to it from the start of the level and there is no checkpoint when you do, so if you die you have to start over from the top of the level. |
| 176 | ** In ''Defender of the Future'', the generator in "Sleeping Forces of Doom" is not actually that hard, but best of luck figuring out how you're supposed to destroy it in a timely manner, without frantically using moves at random hoping ''something'' happens or [[GuideDangIt grovelling over to GameFAQs for help]]. [[spoiler:Sonar the generator's arms when they're picking up rocks fed to them from the chutes until they blow up. When the arms are gone, use the Sonar Grab to pick up the rocks and fling them into shield around the generator.]] |
| 177 | ** ''Defender'''s final battle is a WombLevel with very little room to manuever, a slightly less-than-intuitive way you're supposed to go about destroying [[spoiler:the Foe Queen's heart]], and not one but ''two'' [[TimeLimitBoss time limits]] counting down to your inevitable doom: Ecco's air meter (which is nigh impossible to replenish in this level), and the steadily rising pool of [[spoiler:toxic blood]] from below that will eventually flood the chamber and kill you. |
| 178 | * ''VideoGame/FatalFrame'': |
| 179 | ** In ''3''[[spoiler:Reika Kuze, a.k.a. the Tattooed Priestess]]. She absolutely LOVES this move where she turns the screen black and white, makes it so dark that you can only see yourself, you run like you're moving through jelly, and she chases you. If she touches you, it's a one-shot kill. It's hard to even SEE her, let alone avoid her because you move so slowly. |
| 180 | ** As difficult as that boss can be, the Kusabi in chapter 8 of ''3'' was harder. He's a challenging enemy in his own right, and you have to fight him with Kei, by far the weakest character. If we're talking the Fatal Frame series, the Family Master from the original game is ThatOneBoss. |
| 181 | ** All the bosses from ''Fatal Frame 1'' qualify. Considering the game mechanics made it possible for the ghosts to move faster than Miku, it was very difficult to get a lock on the ghosts that liked to either strafe or teleport. The Family Master was tough, but Ryozo Munakata was just as bad since he mainly moved by teleporting around the area. Then, if you're playing on Nightmare Mode, he has this nifty attack where he mesmerizes Miku into coming towards him so that he could grab her. Then there's the end boss [[spoiler: Kirie]] whose ONLY attack is the insta-kill one and who could only be hurt by a fully charged shot. Oh and she regenerates health over time. |
| 182 | ** The Monk from ''Fatal Frame 1'' is another spirit who was a pain to fight. He not only likes to teleport, but he also tends to bumrush you so that he can deliver a nasty kick to the head. He usually has a fairly large amount of XP and getting a charged shot is annoying. |
| 183 | * ''VideoGame/GodOfWar'': |
| 184 | ** The series has a handful of these, but the final fight in the [[VideoGame/GodOfWarI original game]] against the eponymous God of War is a nightmare on any difficulty other than medium, plus it's a two-parter with an extremely difficult War of the Clones wedged in between. Pure evil. |
| 185 | ** The War of the Clones part. You're fighting a BattleInTheCenterOfTheMind against Kratos doppelgangers who are trying to kill your wife and daughter. You can restore their health by hugging them to transfer your health to them, but that leaves you vulnerable to attacks which will also damage your family. At any given time, there are ''seven'' clones on-screen, and they respawn a LOT. If you get grappled or knocked down even once, it wastes precious seconds, during which the clones quickly slaughter your family. |
| 186 | ** ''VideoGame/GodOfWarII''. First Titan-mode rock minotaur? Not much of a problem. Number 2? A resilient boss with few openings ''AND'' infinite respawning harpies that can 3 shot KO you on titan. There's a reason most guides for this fight use the phrase, "metric assload of luck" liberally. |
| 187 | ** Theseus on Titan, who serves as a huge difficulty spike, even compared to the NintendoHard opening act. He can combo Kratos to Hades and back in his first form, proving to be more of an unpredictable opponent than the {{Mook}}s you've been facing so far. And then comes his second form, where he starts spamming projectiles at you from safety, [[FlunkyBoss starts summoning two Minotaurs at once to fight you at the same time]], and causing large crystal spikes to pop up from the floor which, on Titan, one-shot you. Add all of this on top of the fact that the only way to hurt him in his second form is to shoot him with your incredibly weak bow. And your magic is limited, so the only way to restock it is to run around dodging attacks and killing the Minotaur for blue magic orbs. And it'll take several cycles of this before you even get the chance to finish him off. If you die, you ''go back to the first form''. [[spoiler:He also gets a cheap shot that wipes half your health if you're not blocking when you choose Restart.]] Have fun. |
| 188 | ** The Cerberus Breeder in ''VideoGame/GodOfWarIII''. He spits out kamikaze dogs at you that explode. Sure you can kick them back at him but they don't do a lot of damage. What makes it worse is the Satyr Generals that come to back it up after each time you take off one of its heads. On harder difficulties, you need to turn dodging and blocking into an art form to survive. |
| 189 | ** While most of the bosses in ''VideoGame/GodOfWarPS4'' are designed with a genuine challenge in mind (and even rematches can be difficult if you don't keep your guard up), they are all very much beatable. Except ''the Valkyries.'' Minibosses (thankfully optional) that are ''all'' this with varying levels of difficulty, depending on the player. Special mention must go to Queen Sigrun, who's not only faster and stronger that her sisters, but she utilizes an AllYourPowersCombined playstyle that will ''royally'' fuck you up if you don't constantly keep on the offensive and ensure you're prepared (and you '''WILL''' need to be prepared). |
| 190 | ** ''VideoGame/GodOfWarRagnarok'' has some very good boss battles (Thor, Heimdall and the Raven Keeper are standout examples) that provide an equal balance of challenge and enjoyment. However, much like the predecessor game, the minibosses are where the dev team decided to unleash their sadism, in the form of the Berserker Gravestones; found scattered across the Nine Realms, they are the cursed souls of fallen Asgardian warriors still loyal to Odin and ''by god'' do they show why they had his favor. While most of them are very tricky and do require preparation, they are by and large beatable with diligence and watching their attack patterns (especially with [[FinalBoss the Berserker King]]). However, there is one very notable exception: Hromundr the Cruel and the Sisters of Illska. Not only are there three of them, making picking a target difficult (thank all the gods above that the two sisters share a health bar), but the enclosure of the battlefield makes it exceptionally difficult to maintain a DepthOfField, Hromundr '''does not stop''' attacking you no matter what and the two bitches of Illska unleash barrages of unblockable elemental attacks and AOE strikes, so you essentially have to have a 360 degree defense zone to survive! Many times, you'll find that you've beaten the sisters but are quickly struck down by Svipdagr or you manage to kill Svipdagr but then get completely wrecked by the sisters. |
| 191 | ** Finally, we have Gna, the Valkyrie Queen and Odin's most powerful warrior. Not only does she unleash a barrage of powerful Bifrost attacks that can quickly ware down your health, not only does she strike exceptionally quickly and brutally (and as you may have guessed a lot of her attacks can't be blocked), but she also has a number of moves that can leave you vulnerable to a cutscene kill if your health is low enough or you don't react quickly. To give you an idea of how strong she is, unlike most enemies, she actually lingers and waits patiently for YOU to attack first (you can literally walk right beside her and she does nothing), because the devs (and Gna herself) want you to know this is a fight even the God of War doesn't want. |
| 192 | * Gigan from ''VideoGame/GodzillaMonsterOfMonsters''. His attacks are to spam you with laser blasts that can't be dodged and to trap you in the corner with the buzz saw on his chest and just steadily drain your health. The strategy to beat him consists of hoping he dies before you, and praying he decides to let you out of the corner (Very often he doesn't). |
| 193 | * ''VideoGame/GraffitiKingdom'': Most of the bosses are pushovers, but then you run into Telepin. He floats, dodging a lot of the faster physical attacks, spins around the arena, can block, possesses six weapons that can combo about half your health bar off, and fights you in an arena that creates large explosions in short intervals. He's not even a WakeUpBoss; The boss after him is much easier. |
| 194 | * ''VideoGame/{{Gungrave}}'': |
| 195 | ** Bunji Kugashira can go straight to Hell. The fight starts with him sliding at you; if he hits, he launches an attack that takes out your shield and a quarter of your health. If you dodge, he can ''turn mid-slide'' to catch you. If you get too close, he has a melee attack that blows your shield. What truly makes him a bastard, however, is that he can heal if he gets behind cover. The level has two pillars which he gleefully hops around, healing himself every single time you're out of range. The only, ''only'' way to win is to throw yourself on him and fire until he's dead, channeling Demolition Shots into healing and never letting him get out of the center of the arena (if he gets to a pillar, the fight will stalemate thanks to his regeneration). Topping it all off is that he ''has his own "Graveyard Special"'' (the boss fatality shot that Grave's been using up to this point, which Bunji can ''use at any time'') , as mentioned before. He'll punt poor Grave, sending him flying and come crashing down, causing massive trauma. |
| 196 | ** ''Overdose'' gives us a SequentialBoss, a series of Robot Tanks. At first you're only fighting one, but it is ''impossible'' to hit with your melee weapon (which is REALLY bad if you are playing Juji Kabane's campaign, because Juji is the Speedy Melee Character of the three protagonists) as you are immediately knocked back and causes moderate damage. It's also fast and will constantly spam a barrage of missiles or machine gun fire, and can climb on the walls and slide around, pelting you at all sides. And just when you think it's over, when the first tank is destroyed, '''two more tanks''' show up... |
| 197 | ** The Millenion Leaders Hybrid boss in the laboratory stage. You fight it in a circular arena, but every time you empty its life bar, it just regenerates. It also has a painful sword swipe and explosive projectile attacks that can destroy your shield and cause high damage on higher difficulties, on lower difficulties they won't usually break your shield but still often leaves you with a sliver of shield left, and there's no safe cover in which to regenerate, as you'll want to save your precious Demolition Shots for the generators. You're supposed to wail on the boss until your MissionControl tells you to target the generators and destroy them to stop the boss' regeneration. And all the while you're trying to attack the generators, the boss is throwing said explosive projectiles and sword slashes at you. And when you manage to defeat it, when you're riding the lift to escape, the boss comes back and can now body slam your character, which usually breaks your shield. And you have 150 seconds of game time to kill it, otherwise your character won't escape the CollapsingLair in time. |
| 198 | ** Ballabird Lee in the original game can be highly irritating, bouncing around the fight area in unpredictable patterns, chipping away at Grave's shield with his machine gun hand and a "grab/throw" move that's hard to see coming because of a slightly screwy camera. Lee's normal sword attack also tends to hit like a Mack truck, often breaking a full shield on Hard or Kick-ass. |
| 199 | ** Sherry [=MacDowell=] Walken in ''Overdose''. She's extremely nimble and fast (even faster than Kabane). Being so fast, it's nigh-impossible to pull off a successful Charged Attack against her. You also fight her in a highly confined area and there is nothing to hide behind to regenerate your shield. One of her major attacks, for lack of a better description, closely resembles a DynamicEntry. She will use it, and use it often, and has the possibility of knocking off almost 2/3 of your shield power. And it knocks you down, and eight times out of ten by the time your character gets out of their recovery animation, Sherry will KICK YOU AGAIN. |
| 200 | ** Fangoram in Overdose is also insane. Not only does his gun do insane damage but he'll randomly fire it in every direction and then smash the ground, causing metal support beams to explode out of the ground and fill the level...which makes everything REALLY slow and then you can't see him until his gun shots go through the beams and hit you. |
| 201 | * The Captain from ''VideoGame/HenryHatsworthInThePuzzlingAdventure'' is widely considered the hardest boss in the game. The sea dog himself isn't really a treat as he's a senile, decrepit old geezer in a wheelchair, the real menace is his hulking monster of a nurse who uses him as a bludgeoning tool. Not only the nurse's attacks cause a lot of damage and are tricky to dodge but she can also [[MookMaker pitch capsules that will hatch into monsters]]. It becomes even worse in the last phase that takes underwater, where both the captain and his nurse become temporally invulnerable and you have to dodge them while taking care of their minions until you building up your Super Meter and unleash [[LimitBreak Tea Time]] to finish the crazy old man. The icicles that tend to rain down right before that phase and temporarily make columns unusable should you let them reach the bottom screen certainly didn't help. |
| 202 | * ''VideoGame/{{Ico}}'' has the game's '''final''' and '''only''' boss. In all the other fights you've been in protecting Yorda from Shadows, they could not kill you. Instead, you fight the flippin' [[spoiler: Queen]], who can insta-kill you, and you can only hit [[spoiler: her]] once for every opening [[spoiler: she]] presents. Your only cover from [[spoiler:her]] attacks disappear after a certain amount of hits, so good luck in getting those hits in. |
| 203 | * ''VideoGame/{{Iji}}'': |
| 204 | ** In the higher difficulties, especially Ultimortal, the second Asha fight, in Sector X, is generally considered the single hardest boss of the game, and being the main obstacle that stands between people and Turbo Mode/Null Driver/Sector Y. Few people are capable of beating the second Asha fight in Ultimortal difficulty without the use of the Checkpoint. |
| 205 | ** The reason it's hard is reaction time. He has about 10 different attacks, and each has one or two ways to avoid it, but will always hit you if you're still. The problem is that you've got a window of generally about 0.2 seconds to see him appear, notice what position he's in and hence what attack he's going to perform, and start your dodge before it's too late. And he teleports around like crazy between attacks to confuse you, and fake images of him start appearing halfway through the fight. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWVapd9xmwg From 7:43 onward this video shows the problem very well.]] |
| 206 | ** Also from ''Iji'', Proxima on the higher difficulties. This robotic boss can unleash a ton of attacks at once, many of which are very difficult to dodge (or else dodging one will get you hit by another), and unless you have very good weapon stats (which are not available on Ultimortal anyway) the only way to beat it is to hit it repeatedly into an electropod. The catch is that you have to wait for it to recharge, an increasingly long time with each difficulty, and during that time there's nothing you can do but try desperately to survive. |
| 207 | * ''VideoGame/JetForceGemini'': |
| 208 | ** The Eshcebone Mantises. Yes, there's two of them. Giant cyborg mantises with a ridiculously wide variety of attacks, fairly small weak points for most of the fight, a dark battlefield, and (like all bosses in the game) there's no BossArenaRecovery. |
| 209 | ** Mizar, even by final boss standards, is infamously difficult. He has many nasty attacks, including a swarm of meteors, shockwaves, ice blasts, and worst of all, a ball of electricity that follows Juno around the small platform he's on, and takes off ''a whole bar of health'' if it connects for ''one second.'' But what makes him truly difficult is that unlike all other bosses, ''Mizar has no pattern to his AI.'' He launches all of his attacks at random. |
| 210 | * ''VideoGame/KeithCourageInAlphaZones'': Mr. Roboto (did they get sued for using this name?), the boss of the Toxic Zone. A floating HumongousMecha who moves in an arc pattern and takes off a full heart with each hit, unlike the other bosses, and has much more HP than previous bosses. Even worse, the FinalBoss is a suped-up PaletteSwap of him with an invincible purple AttackDrone. |
| 211 | * The robot guard Biscarsh in ''VideoGame/{{Klonoa}} 2: Lunatea's Veil'' is a nightmare. The first form is pretty easy, providing you know what you're doing. And then it TurnsRed. First of all, it tries to turn Klonoa into a Dream Traveller pancake requiring you to grab an enemy, run into the middle and jump over his head in order to hit his weakness. Then he has the nerve to send homing missles after you whilst floating in the air! |
| 212 | * ''VideoGame/TheLegendaryStarfy'': The final stage of the final boss, which is literal button-mashing so fast the only way I've heard of that could CONCEIVABLY work is to pause the game and put it down when you get tired. Oh, and you do this [[OverlyLongGag TWICE]]. Smouldering hate. |
| 213 | * Peg Leg Pete in ''VideoGame/MickeyMousecapade''. He throws a constant stream of daggers that randomly change direction and are nearly impossible to dodge, and the only consistent way to defeat him is to resort to cheap tricks like inching up the ladder and shooting, or putting the invincible Minnie up there if she has her stars. He reappears as a DegradedBoss in the Castle, but is even worse there, as there is no where to hide from his daggers. The only way to get past him without losing a ton of health (afterwards, you have to face the Walrus, a BossInMookClothing, followed by Maleficent, the BigBad herself) is to [[LuckBasedMission hope that you find an invincibility fairy behind one of the windows]]. Oh, and god help you if you left the key to the BossRoom behind, as he will respawn and OneHitKill you if you backtrack. |
| 214 | * ''VideoGame/MischiefMakers'' has the second fight with Merco, when he brings his [[TransformingMecha Phoenix Gamma]]. [[FlawlessVictory Getting the Gold Gem]] for that boss is beastly hard, and it's respectably hard just to beat it at all. |
| 215 | * ''Modarchive Story'' is a shining example of Nintendo Hard in general, but Doragon is utterly ridiculous. When and where it will spit fire is RANDOM, and you die in one hit. And you have to hit him lots of times. Oddly enough, it's the boss of one of the easier stages, and the Scrappy Level (Zepsi Industries) has perhaps the easiest boss fight in the game. |
| 216 | * ''VideoGame/NinjaGaiden'': |
| 217 | ** In the Xbox games, every boss is That One Boss for ''somebody.'' Special mention to Murai in the first game. He's the ''first boss in the game'' and a good number of people need help fighting him. He can block your attacks, dodge your magic, dash attack like you can, combo you for massive damage, and grab you (which is unblockable). Murai is even worse on [[NintendoHard Master Ninja Difficulty]], where he's [[FlunkyBoss accompanied by elite ninjas]] who you normally don't see until the endgame; not only are they very aggressive but they like to throw explosive shurikens from offscreen (and of course [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard if they hit Murai by mistake, he's not affected in the slightest]]). If the previous upgrade in enemy difficulty didn't convince you how much harder Master Ninja will be, this fight will. |
| 218 | ** Alma from ''VideoGame/NinjaGaiden Black''. Alma is the queen of That One Bosses, the That One Boss from which all lesser That One Boss sprang. |
| 219 | ** Ghost Doku's backup on Hard Mode (where every boss is accompanied by some Mooks that get reinforcements every time you damage the boss) is especially annoying, as the Nunchuks are ill-suited to fighting him, but the only thing that can effectively kill the ghost fish. Waiting him out and hoping to outlast him by burning through your Elixirs of Spiritual Life is also not an option, as he can drain your health. |
| 220 | ** The three NES games have many tough bosses, but the worst is the final boss [[spoiler:Jacquio]] in the first game, because his fireballs are almost impossible to dodge, and losing against him sends you back three levels. Getting to him with an Air Slash is the only way most people beat him. While there is a some strategy in dodging his fireballs, what's worse is his hitbox[[note]]They work like the eagles only at full speed -- if you're sufficiently far away, just keep moving and they'll fly right off the screen[[/note]]. Being triangular in shape in a day where squares were the norm, his hitbox (which includes contact damage) is a bit bigger than what you think. And he takes off 3 HP per contact, versus 1HP per fireball. |
| 221 | * The Wii ''Franchise/OnePiece'' games have the battle with Gecko Moria in ''[[VideoGame/OnePieceUnlimitedCruise Unlimited Cruise Episode 1]]''. He spends the majority of the battle running away from you, which makes dealing damage very difficult. As he flees, he consistently launches annoying shadowy projectiles. It gets worse after you manage to bring him down to half health. He begins frequently abusing his super, Shadows Asgard, an annoying, almost impossible to avoid attack that given your levels is an instant kill for whoever it hits. Luckily you have nine characters to use, but the fight becomes a race to catch up to and deal damage to the boss before he murders everyone with Shadows Asgard. |
| 222 | * ''Onslaught'' (2009 FPS) has the Mission 8 boss which has turned into ThatOneBoss for many players. It might be because the boss has a tendency to correct its aim while using its extremely damaging beam attack that you're supposed to sidestep. Also the small arena and spawning smaller enemies make it very easy to sidestep into an obstacle, making even the usually easily dodged jump attack a threat. |
| 223 | * ''[[VideoGame/PrinnyCanIReallyBeTheHero Prinny: Can I Really be the Hero]]'': |
| 224 | ** The second form of Sir Sweet is one of the few bosses with a reputation for literately inflicting physical pain on the player themselves. Does not play by the rules of boss fights meaning that you have to fight a NintendoHard boss without being able to stun him by wailing on the attack button for two and a half minutes per life, and you will lose a bunch. About as painful as the [[VideoGame/MetalGearSolid micro wave chamber]]. |
| 225 | ** Chose the Magma Hideout as your 6th stage? You end up battling Tsukikage, Hoshikage's [[SuperpoweredEvilSide superpowered eviler side.]] She uses all the same attacks, ''but at triple the speed.'' |
| 226 | * The sequel, ''Dawn of Operation Panties, Dood!'', introduced a new handful of overpowered bosses, including: |
| 227 | ** Chili, Pow and Der on the Stage 5 version of Unlucky Swamp. Besides having to battle three bosses simultaneously, you start this version of the fight SURROUNDED. The sisters bounce back and forth erratically, causing you to miss your [[GroundPound hip pounds]], and stunning one will only give the others time to gang up on you. Chili ''has'' to be taken out first, as she can summon lightning bolts and, given enough time, '''heal the damage dealt to her and her sisters.''' And the other two sisters summon homing skull mooks the whole time. The Deity that they summon in the Stage 6 version is a cinch by comparison. |
| 228 | ** Mustard in Sakura Palace 3+4 may be a bubble headed cheer girl who doesn't fight directly, but the monsters that she summons always manage to be in just the right spots to hit you out of your combos, allowing her to teleport to another part of the arena with an ever-increasing pep squad that only manages to get in your way. |
| 229 | ** Lee Jiang Long in Undersea Volcano 6, despite being a gigantic dragon, has a ridiculously small weak point that's constantly moving; this means that your hip pound will most likely have no effect at best, and possibly send you screaming into the abyss. Its attacks cover a large portion of the tiny area that you have to maneuver in, and an endless amount of homing skulls rise from the pit for good measure. |
| 230 | * Direct from ''[[WesternAnimation/TheRenAndStimpyShow Ren and Stimpy]]: Veediots'' is the "battle" against Ren at the end of the Stimpy's Invention level. You have to simply toss the Happy Helmet onto Ren's head to finish the level, but you are given no indication on what to do, and trying to throw the helmet at Ren is a challenge in itself. The helmet can barely reach the platform Ren is on, and if it goes on the platform but you miss him, it will get sucked into a tube and brought back down to your level, allowing you to try again. There's also two floating platforms, but you can't reach them, and they're no help at all, since the helmet slides off them almost instantly. To add insulf to injury, all Ren does is pace back and forth randomly at the top of the screen, saying "You eediot!" over and over again. |
| 231 | * ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil5'': |
| 232 | ** If you're playing single player on Professional difficulty, be prepared to face hell against Wesker [[spoiler:and Jill]]. This is mostly because Sheva LOVES running off to get killed, on a difficulty in which 1 hit sends you into Dying status. The only way to beat Wesker on your own here is to bring a rocket launcher and ''pray'' you can hit him with it, which tends to be ridiculously hard to do. |
| 233 | ** Ndesu, aka The El Gigante of Africa. You are caught in a truck that you cannot move, and the only way to not be hit is to A. shoot him enough so that the attack is disabled (ala House Of The Dead, but without the helpful meter), or B. hit the action commands that come up for a half-second. Chances are, you're gonna get the A. part in spades, until he pulls a giant boulder out of the ground, which you need to shoot before it hits you, otherwise that's a massive chunk of your health. For the B. part, chances are, cause the weapons you get are a RPK) and a minigun, you're gonna be busy firing, and if you hold over, and THEN try to hit the action commands, you fail it. Also, random enemies like to come in at about the halfway point, and shoot you with the flaming arrows, and you can't heal yourself if your health is too low, because you're in a ''truck''. No matter how bad that boss is on the console version, the PC version is much, much worse. The keyboard action commands are very poorly located, and a lot of keyboards won't detect the buttons properly anyway. |
| 234 | * Any battle against Axel Gear involving two Mechas in the ''VideoGame/RocketKnightAdventures'' series. On Normal, they're bearable. On Hard, you better hope you have full health walking into it. And, what's worse, the SNES ''Sparkster'' game has a [[TrueFinalBoss special surprise]] for those that defeat the FinalBoss on Hard which makes the Axel Gear fight look easy. |
| 235 | * ''VideoGame/ShadowOfTheColossus'': |
| 236 | ** The 9th colossus is a giant turtle. The only way to successfully climb onto him (the point of the game) is to lure him onto stepping on some geysers. He frequently steps over them or walks just a few feet near him, making that an exercise in frustration. If you get him to step on a geyser, you have a small window of time to shoot the underside of his feet so he flips over. Then, you have to run around and climb on his belly. When you're about to finish climbing, he stands up. If you aren't positioned right, you fall off. If you manage to stay on killing him is easy. The boss isn't incredibly lethal and doesn't sound hard to beat in text, but all the components make him incredibly aggravating and unfun to fight him in the game. |
| 237 | ** The 16th and final colossus. All the wonderful landscapes in the game are NOT present, and the whole fight is in shades of black and very dark grey. Just in case you have the superhuman vision to dicern color in this mess, the camera abrubtly turns into a big pile of ass, too. Oh, and if you fail any part of the second half, you fall off and have to do it all over again. |
| 238 | ** The eleventh Colossus? A comparatively tiny (only the size of a VW bus or so) colossus, something like a cross between a pit bull and an actual bull. If you happen to fall into its pit and fail at dodging its attack even once, it'll knock you around with abandon, stunning you completely with each blow and attacking again just as you begin to wake up. |
| 239 | ** The 4th Colossus can eat a bag of ass. For those who don't know, it's a giant horse. The area around you if completely surrounded by...tombs probably. This thing's only climbable area is on its tail, which is too high for you to reach. So you get it's attention near one of the tombs until it starts attacking the tomb like an ass. You need to run to the other side, since all the tombs ar connected under ground. The issue? 1. You need to be within striking distance for him to even GIVE a crap you're there. 2. You need to be FAST, and since a gentle nudge will send Wander head over ass, that's difficult. 3. The Colossus has ADD, and making him stay near the tomb in time to run over to the other side, let alone to the colossus is pretty difficult. |
| 240 | ** The 15th colossus, Argus, requires the player to complete a ''very'' convoluted set of maneuvers in order to even have a chance at reaching his weak spots. Dormin's hints are cryptic as usual, and it can often take players a long time to figure out the correct solution to the puzzle. This is not aided by the fact that Argus walks faster than Wander can run and is constantly trying to smash him to bits while the player attempts to think. |
| 241 | ** The third Colossus, on normal mode, is a surprising jump in difficulty from the first two, with the added inconvenience of there being a long drop below the arena, necessitating a long climb (and possibly a lengthy swim) to get back to the boss if you fall off. On hard mode, the thing's capable of killing you in a single hit from the attack you have to get it to use before you can climb onto it (at least twice if you're using the normal strategy, one of which must land on a specific position), and it has an additional, necessary weak point located inconveniently out of the way of any ledges. |
| 242 | * ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheForceUnleashed'': |
| 243 | ** Kazdan Paratus. The little bastard skitters around the stage way faster than you can, and often slips out of your lock-on. Force Push and Grip are next to useless, as he blocks them nearly every time. He, on the other hand, can break your block with every attack. The only way to really damage him is Lightning...which you only receive at the beginning of the level, and thus do not have time to power up. Damage him enough, and he ''leaves the stage'', hurling detritus at you. If you don't dodge, you take damage from the hit ''and'' the fall. Damage him some more and he summons Junk Titans (essentially giant, tough minibosses) to fight you...''twice''. The highest difficulty is... difficult. |
| 244 | ** Comparable is Shaak Ti, who, unlike other Jedi bosses, cannot be Aerial Ambushed, a peculiarity she shares with Kazdan Paratus, which is normally your choice to hit a boss for massive damage. Then there are her deadly saber combos, her charge attacks, which leave her invulnerable while charging, [[FlunkyBoss the fact that she constantly summons Felucians to annoy you]], and the exploding slime... [[BuffySpeak thingies]] on the sides of the arena, which explode if you get too close, which can lead to annoying situations where you're juggled between said exploding slimes after getting knocked into them by Shaak Ti. [[HoistByHisOwnPetard Luckily, you can do the same to her]]. And in the second half, she may occasionally go offscreen to have the Sarlacc's tentacles wail on you, which is especially annoying if you have to keep Felucians off your back at the same time. On [[IdiosyncraticDifficultyLevels Sith Master]], this battle is... hard. This is, however, somewhat alleviated by the SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic and the fight itself being a SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome. |
| 245 | ** In the Wii version, Chop'aa while riding his basilisk. The bloody thing is too large for Pushing or Gripping to work, it's bloody fast, it has extreme amounts of health, and stopping to unleash some Force Lightning all but guarantees getting your head swatted by a giant claw, even if you try to jump away. At least Chop'aa himself is a cakewalk. |
| 246 | ** Also from the Wii version, Kento Marek, specifically during the rematch in the Jedi Temple. It's as if the man somehow perceives reality at a faster rate than you can; he blocks or counters most frontal assaults or Force attacks, seems to run and jump faster, and ''will'' catch you if you're not constantly moving. |
| 247 | ** In the 360/[=PS3=] version, aside from the [[FakeDifficulty poorly-implemented]] boss fight against the Star Destroyer, there's also the final boss of either path. [[spoiler:The Emperor, on the Light Side, can hit you anywhere, anytime, with his Force Lightning, and has a bad habit of flipping on an invincible shield before he chucks four very-damaging, very-difficult-to-avoid projectiles at you. Darth Vader, on the Dark Side, is egregious simply because you've ''already'' beaten the crap out of him and blown off half his armor, so why is this decrepit half-machine half-man putting up such a fight?!]] |
| 248 | ** The sequel has the Gorog, whose fight never seems to end, and the final boss is [[spoiler: Darth Vader, who is turned into a PerfectPlayAI. He will block any Force attacks you try, even lightning, meaning you must rely on your lightsaber. Also, in the first half of the fight, he keeps retreating and sending clones at you.]] |
| 249 | * People who have played ''VideoGame/ToyStory'' will often comment on their nightmarish encounter with The Claw. This is officially when the game gets hard for some. You have to use Woody's pull-string to throw squeaking alien toys at the Claw before it carries Buzz off. It's harder than it sounds, particularly on the SNES, where the hit-detection on the aliens is weird. Also, you have to survive about five or six of Sid's coins before he "runs out," and Buzz gets closer to the edge each time. (Mysteriously, the storyline tells us that he has managed to capture Buzz ''and'' Woody between levels). On the Platform/SegaGenesis version, the aliens are easier to hit -- but there's this random swinging cable that you have to keep avoiding. |
| 250 | * The final boss in ''VideoGame/TrueCrimeStreetsOfLA''. Not only does it not make any sense, but this is where the difficulty spikes horrendously. Specifically, every single boss in the game up til the end could easily be beaten with simple Button Mashing, whereas the final boss had to be beaten with an actual strategy (blocking then counter-attacking), which most players would never have guessed since the game never hints at this and Button Mashing got them all the way to the end just fine. |
| 251 | * ''VideoGame/{{Valis}}: The Phantasm Soldier'' (the first game of the series) has two of these. The first one is [[BastardUnderstudy Voldes]], the twin-headed skeleton dragon (whose most damaging attack -- the lightning spell -- CAN be blocked with a well-timed spell casting). The second one, which is more difficult, is [[spoiler: Reiko]], who has the Final Flash spell that deals just under 50% damage every time it hits you, and cannot be blocked or countered. Oh, and [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard guess how strong it is in your hands?]] |
| 252 | * Biomeka from ''VideoGame/WonderBoyInMonsterWorld'', plays this to a T. 2 Forms with a Yellow Green Bar (Highest HP in game), uses Laser cannons which have a full Blue Bar (Highest HP for regular monsters) and those cannons can respawn, and on the second form, has a conveyor belt with a Buzzsaw on it in addition to the laser cannons. You have better have got enough Power or Thunder magic, because you will need it. |
| 253 | * ''VideoGame/ZombiesAteMyNeighbors'': |
| 254 | ** The game has the battle against Dr. Tongue's spider form. First off, you have to battle it, unlike the rest of the [[MiniBoss MiniBosses]] who may or may not have to be killed to complete the level. Unlike those other bosses, [[GiantSpaceFleaFromNowhere you are given no warning of its appearance]]; when the doctor character had been encountered previously, he only vanished. As for the boss itself, it is ''huge'', taking up most of the screen. However, it is still [[LightningBruiser quite capable of sprinting around the screen]], laying down webbing that slows your character down and spawning endless numbers of tiny spiders. Its only weak-point is its head, which is very small. Finally, you have to fight this thing ''twice'', and the second time is [[SequentialBoss immediately followed up with another boss battle.]] |
| 255 | ** The giant babies. They are ludicrously fast, frequently speeding into your view, stunning you with [[CollisionDamage collision damage]], then speeding back out. And you have no invincibility after recovering from this, so they can just stand on top of you and drain all of your health if they feel like it. Unless you brought in some really strong items, the only safe strategy is to stand just outside their range and blindly shoot, hoping that their random fly-like movement runs them into the projectiles. What's more, they transform into a normal, rescuable baby when they are defeated, meaning they must be beaten to finish the level. If you manage to run out of ammo trying to hit them and there's no more left, you've just [[UnwinnableByDesign softlocked yourself]], since dying does not restart the level. |
| 256 | [[/folder]] |
| 257 | |
| 258 | [[folder:Others Part 3]] |
| 259 | * ''VideoGame/AlienSoldier''. Being a BossGame, there was bound to be ''at least one'' of these. |
| 260 | ** 7th Force's boss battle has a whole stage dedicated to it and, by Alien Soldier standards, its 5 forms aren't really that hard. Problem is, there's no way to heal in 3 of those forms AND you are on a tight clock -- while Valkyrie and Artemis Force are very easy, Medusa and Silpheed are major time sinks unless you know exactly what you are doing and Sirene is just so very hard, being a fast target with crazy range, a small weak spot and a tricky underwater stage filled with ''mines that circle around you''. |
| 261 | ** Epsilon-1, the main character's SuperpoweredEvilSide that somehow manifested into an [[AIIsACrapshoot evil]] HumongousMecha eagle bent on destroying humanity. Its weak spot, the head, was blocked by its two damage-absorbing talons, making it hard to squeeze in shots. Secondly, the only weapon effective against it was the [[EnergyWeapon Lancer]] which did huge damage, but each shot cost a TON of ammo. Worse still, you might have probably run out of ammo for it after a BossRush consisting of three other bosses, two of which were not exactly easy. Thirdly, EVERY SINGLE ONE of Epsilon-1's attacks did '''200''' damage to you character (enough to kill you in say, 4 hits). The only saving grace you had against this fiend was that it was one of the few bosses that ''did not'' do any CollisionDamage to you. |
| 262 | * The Jabberwock from ''VideoGame/AmericanMcGeesAlice''. Ironically, Alice fights him twice, and while the first time is a HopelessBossFight, it's ''much'' easier than the second time, where this Trope is truly the case. The biggest difference from the first and second fights is that he has enough room to truly utilize his ability to fly in the second one, letting him attack from the air, directly above Alice (which is nasty enough in a game like this) and his primary attack sets Alice on fire, causing her to flail and scream. (If there's any consolation, Alice will have added the Jabberwock Eye Staff and Blunderbuss to her arsenal between the two battles, and those are a necessity to winning this one.) |
| 263 | * ''[[VideoGame/ApeEscape Ape Escape 2]]'' gives us the final confrontation with [[BigBad Specter]]. Appropriate, considering he's the TrueFinalBoss, but still qualifies as ThatOneBoss considering that every other boss in the game (including the [[DiscOneFinalBoss first battle with Specter]]) is almost laughably easy if you know what you're doing. Specter starts the fight in his floating chair, where he has two attacks. One of them is tolerable, but the other one is just plain unfair. To elaborate, he summons some kind of blue glowing [[DoomyDoomsOfDoom Hula-Hoop of Doom]] which appears above and slightly to the side of you. It then proceeds to home in on you, descend, and rapidly shrink, forcing you to jump. This wouldn't be so bad if more of them didn't appear immediately afterwards, and because they appear slightly off to the side, it's highly likely you'll jump to dodge one ring only to fly into the next one like an idiot. Your jump timing has to be practically ''perfect'' to survive the rings unscathed, and even when you think you've got the pattern down, the last ring shrinks ''slightly'' slower than the others just to throw you off. Then you knock the Simian [[PrecisionFStrike bastard]] out of his chair, but that [[NoSell doesn't count as a hit]]. He starts running about at a ludicrously fast speed, and only when you hit him in ''this'' state does the damage count. If you take too long or if you destroy his chair, he'll start fighting you on the ground, where he starts using even ''more'' cheap attacks, including an undodgeable, unblockable [[MindOverMatter telekinetically-thrown box]], creating [[DoppelgangerAttack doppelgangers]] just to [[IShallTauntYou taunt you]] (and it is [[LuckBasedMission nigh-impossible to figure out which one is the real Specter]]), and an invincible homing charge attack which, again, can't be dodged. You've probably gotten so used to using the [[SuperSpeed Dash Hoop]] to dodge boss attacks by this point, that [[DamnYouMuscleMemory it never occurs to you]] that the only way to avoid these attacks is with the Sky Flyer. Even if you use the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Power Punch/Magic Punch]] on him to do more damage ([[AwesomeButImpractical which is a feat in itself]], since Specter is so damn fast and jittery), the battle is still hard as well as more drawn-out than necessary, as you have to hit him ''at least 5 times'' (it should be noted that for every other boss in the game, 5 hits is the absolute ''maximum'' required to beat them, and most traditional bosses follow the RuleOfThree anyway). And to top it all off, it doesn't matter how many [[VideoGameLives Jackets]] you have, if you die at any point during the battle, then it's all the way back to the start for you! |
| 264 | * The amoeba-like boss in level 17 of ''VideoGame/{{Arkanoid}} 2: the Revenge of [=DoH=]''. It's an UnexpectedGameplayChange, where you have to hit the boss repeatedly with the ball, which increases in speed much faster than it would on most stages, while it [[MookMaker emits a constant stream of enemies]] at all times -- and yes, it can spit out an enemy right where the ball is about to hit it, acting like a shield. If that wasn't bad enough, it randomly decides which enemies will be spat out every time the level loads. If it decides to spit out [[DemonicSpiders those black spheres that couldn't be destroyed by the ball]] on this go and nothing but, you have to accept losing a life. And it [[ContinuingIsPainful recovers all its health if you die]]. |
| 265 | * Every ''VideoGame/ArmoredCore'' fan worth their salt will instantly recognize Nineball, who has become an EnsembleDarkHorse for the series for this very reason. It helps that he has an [[SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic incredibly badass theme]]. In particular, [[MoreDakka Rimfire]] from [=AC=]: Last Raven is savvy enough to come immediately after a weaker boss, and he's got 2 back mounted-chain guns, and duel wielding 4 barreled machine guns. He'd be a WakeUpCallBoss if every other boss wasn't nearly as bad. |
| 266 | * ''VideoGame/BillyHatcherAndTheGiantEgg'': |
| 267 | ** Moles the Walrus. He first starts by ice-skidding towards you which is easy to dodge, but then he rolls into a sphere of ice, and very rapidly starts bouncing around the room, and this attack is ''very'' unpredictable. To make matter worse, every time he hits a wall, small ice spheres appear and start bouncing around the room with him. Eventually, he will stop and allow you to hurt him, but those ice spheres are still bouncing around, and while you're focusing on hurting him, those ice spheres can hit you, stunning you for a second, and he will repeat this process for the whole fight. |
| 268 | ** [[EvilSorcerer Dark Corvo]] is even worse. He uses shadow clones of previous bosses that you have fought, and some of his attacks are extremely hard to dodge. For example, his shadow clone of Glur shoots homing bouncy balls, and his Saltim clone rapid fires bombs at you, which are ''very'' hard to dodge. Also, when Dark Corvo clones himself and attacks you, he attacks at high speed, and there is no clue as to which is the real one, and if you don't hit the right one fast enough he will repeat the attack. It is especially painful that Dark Corvo comes after one of the [[ThatOneLevel hardest levels]] in the game. He's so hard that ''the game actually warns you how hard he's gonna be before you fight him, and this is a [[NintendoHard hard game!]]'' |
| 269 | * ''Manga/{{Bleach}}: Soul Carnival 2'': |
| 270 | ** The Stage 24 boss, a [[DualBoss pair]] of Menos Grande. One of them will invariably teleport ''right on top of you'' at the start of the fight, and getting hit by these guys sends you flying. It doesn't help that half the ground you can fight these behemoths on is quicksand, which does damage if you're stuck in it long enough. Additionally, your regular attacks do naught but ''1 point of damage'' to them, forcing you to rely on special attacks. And if you get caught in between them while they BeamSpam, but can't hit both of them at once? Time to start over. |
| 271 | ** Hollow Ichigo in Stage 21. Hollow Ichigo is fast and can do anything you can do...with one exception: He can use a Burning Attack and you can't. One that takes up ''the screen and deals an ungodly amount of damage.'' |
| 272 | ** There's Ikkaku and Renji at the end of the first [[BrutalBonusLevel Challenge stage.]] If Ikkaku's long spear combos don't drive you up the wall, then Renji's homing sword-things will. And if ''that'' doesn't get you? They will ''invariably'' activate Bankai, sometimes simultaneously. In this state, their attacks get ridiculous range and priority, and a Burning Attack won't stagger them. It does damage, sure, but it doesn't stop their relentless assault. |
| 273 | * ''VideoGame/{{Bomberman 64}}'': |
| 274 | ** The fight against Mantis will first start off in her cave, in which the floor is incredibly slick and difficult to maneuver around. She happily enjoys jabbing you with her enormous mantis-like front legs (and jump up to attack with both), climbing along the walls to spit out baby-spider-like things, and sliding herself into you. However, the battle really goes hay-wire when you've damaged her life meter to halfway, she ''breaks the floor'' and drops you down to her web, in which there's a good chance you'll miss it and fall to your doom. Considering she takes up a good portion of the screen, if you don't fall to your doom, you still have the possibility of doing so because you walked off the web, all the while she still tries pick and prod you to death. If you do fall and you haven't collected the 100 gold cards yet, Sirius will come to help you up, but upon collecting all the gold cards, you'll just fall and die. |
| 275 | ** The fight against the Cerebus is insanely difficult because the fact that all his weapons have an enormously wide and short range, and the room you fight him in is very small and enclosed. His machine gun fire is pretty easy to avoid, but his homing missiles from his two primary canons and his smaller homing missiles from his container "shoulders" (it's a hovering robot) can and will force you into a trap. What's worse, if you haven't destroyed his arm canons and you hang alongside the wall too much during his attacks, he'll ''do a back-flip loop'' with enormous laser blades and try pulverize you into the wall with a mighty whack. There's also another attack he uses that creates an odd light glow in the middle of the room that slows you down, but allows him to keep moving at an insanely high speed, and walking into that light will cause you to die by ''shrinking out of existence'' (however, you can get a gold card if you kick a bomb into and also disable the beam). Add all of this into the fact that he dodges all bombs kicked at him and that this is only the "normal" level of gameplay (hard is much worse), and you have the ultimate "high-tech harvester" as the name of the battle implies. |
| 276 | * Think the Wii version of ''VideoGame/ABoyAndHisBlob'' looks cute? You'll be changing your tune ''hardcore'' after you encounter The Beast at the end of World 2. You have to lure him close to you, create holes in the ground, and let airborne mines drift down to blow up on him. Sounds simple, right? Except that, while the Boy and Blob toddle around at an appropriately little-boy-ish pace, the Beast is lightning fast, vicious, and so friggin' ''huge'' that even the highest platform in the arena isn't safe from his [[CombatTentacles horrible back tentacles]] of oozing [[DoomyDoomsOfDoom DOOM.]] You have a [[NighInvulnerable literal safety bubble]], but can't use it and the hole you need to defeat the boss at the same time. Even the developers themselves said he was too hard! |
| 277 | * Out of all the bosses in ''VideoGame/{{Bug|1995}}'', one of them stands out as ''far'' more frustrating than the others: The swamp worm from [[BubblegloopSwamp Splot]]. Bug was on a floating platform for almost the entire battle, and getting hit even ''once'' would cause him to be knocked backwards, very likely off the platform and subsequently [[SuperDrowningSkills into the water for a watery death]] (MercyInvincibility did NOT save Bug if he touched the water). Halfway through, Bug will have to board an even smaller platform than the initial one, thus knockback and drowning death was certain if Bug took damage meaning that there was almost ''no room for error'' after this. The boss' lunging and SuperSpit attacks had to be dodged perfectly, and the player had to GoombaStomp it correctly without letting momentum throw them off course from the platform or else it's one life lost and having to do the boss fight from the start (including its overly long intro animation) again. |
| 278 | * ''VideoGame/{{Claw}}'' is a fairly challenging game in its own right, so it's only natural that certain bosses encountered prove a pain to deal with. |
| 279 | ** Wolvington, third boss of the game. You have likely a split second to move towards him before he starts throwing magic bullets at you, stripping you off 15 health a hit. You have 100 at max. He throws up to ''six'' bullets, so do the math. Even when you do manage to corner him he counters every hit with an upper. Think you can just crouch-slash your way through the fight? Have a sword. New versions of the game {{Nerf}}ed his magic blasts to more reasonable 5 health per hit. |
| 280 | ** Gabriel that comes after Wolvington is a seemingly straightforward {{Puzzle Boss}}: you have to use his cannon against him to damage him. What's the catch? Well, he throws bombs like ''crazy''. As if the sole fact that the tiles you need to climb on to even reach the button disappear after a second or so, if he hits you, you're down 15 health ''and'' stun-locked in the air. If, God forbid, he wallops you with all three of those, well, have fun. Oh, and he periodically summons [[EliteMooks Red Tail Pirates]] to bother you. There's an exploit you can use to reach him instantly and end a fight in a flash, but then you miss out on all the treasure beforehand. Pick your poison. |
| 281 | ** Marrow: to reach him you have to hit his parrot a couple of times to open yourself a path and not get impaled on {{One Hit Kill}} spikes. Too bad that the parrot comes out so fast you have to react immediately to not get hit. Marrow himself also takes potshots at you with his pistol while you're struggling to avoid both. And when you finally reach him if you're not swift enough there's a chance he'll just gut you like a fish with his sword. |
| 282 | ** Red Tail, the penultimate boss. Compared to others he has no fancy gimmick apart from his Western Winds, but you won't have a good time regardless. If you drop off the ledge for even a moment he'll blow you right into spikes and even then you have to watch out for throwing daggers, pistol shots and slides. Add to the fact that you can only hit him twice before he hops back to safety and that he's got health to spare and you're in for a frustrating slugfest. |
| 283 | ** While Omar is a {{Final Boss}}, he gained enough notoriety among the fanbase to qualify as TOB. The first phase of this fight has you jumping through a variety of traps and pitfalls to reach a power-up necessary to damage him... and even once you have it, you still need to go back and hit him through a small hole in his fire/ice shield, effectively giving you something like ten-fifteen seconds. You have to do it three more times before you can take an elevator to the second phase of the fight and now Omar is ''serious.'' You have to reach him through a course of {{Bottomless Pits}} where a single hit will stun-lock you mid-air and most likely throw you into the lava. Before he was {{Nerfed}}, you needed to hit him ''twelve'' times. At least he was forgiving enough to not make you repeat both phases of the fight. |
| 284 | * ''VideoGame/{{Contra}}'': |
| 285 | ** The Stage 4 boss in the original game. Spams homing projectiles that [[UnstableEquilibrium increase in frequency the longer you take]], and its [[AttackItsWeakPoint weak points]] are only vulnerable for a split-second at a time. If you lost your Spread Gun, [[ContinuingIsPainful you're more or less screwed]]. |
| 286 | ** The Stage 5 boss in ''VideoGame/ContraIIITheAlienWars'' is this when you're playing on the hardest difficulty. It starts out simple at first, but when the ground starts moving, you'll likely walk straight into one of the boss's flamethrowers or end up walking into the boss itself. And to top it all off, it's even hard to hit! |
| 287 | * None of the bosses in ''VideoGame/EnterTheGungeon'' are slouches, but there are a couple in particular that stand out, which makes obtaining the Master Rounds for certain floors particularly heinous. |
| 288 | ** The Ammoconda, one of the three possible bosses in the Gungeon Proper. True to its name, it's enormous, darts around the room erratically at dizzying speeds and fires several rapid, unpredictable volleys of projectiles, some of which can change their direction to hit you, from each of its abdominal segments, which it has about, oh, ''twelve'' of. If that wasn't bad enough, several small turrets can spawn in at several locations in the room, which take serious amounts of firepower to destroy and can be consumed by the Ammoconda to regain health and increase its defenses. |
| 289 | ** Treadnaught, one of the two normal bosses in the Black Powder Mines, is probably the most despised out of all the early-game bosses. No subtleties or gimmicks here, just a gigantic tank that rolls around the room at high speed and fires an absurd assortment of bullets, from explosive rounds that obliterate what little cover you have, to bullets that can quickly scatter additional spread projectiles, all on top of ''even more bullets'' coming from the manned turrets and tank driver. While it is a fairly large target, it never lets up on the offense one bit, and with all the bullet patterns randomly piling up on each other, it's like swimming a raging river of unpredictable projectile volleys, one after the other. Worse still, amidst all the chaos, you're also ''highly'' susceptible to being flanked by Tanker mooks from behind, and if you don't take them out before they add up, you may as well kiss the Master Round goodbye. Cannonbalrog is no walk in the park, but he's a breeze compared to this mess. |
| 290 | ** The High Priest, fought in the Hollow, easily beats out its contemporaries the Kill Pillars and the Wallmonger, and is arguably the most difficult normal boss fight in the game. He has an absurd health pool -- despite what his very slender stature would suggest -- can render himself invincible by teleporting throughout the room, takes a page from Treadnaught's book of tricks and rinses the screen with complex bullet patterns fired off in rapid succession, has at least two different attacks that home in on your position, and has [[ThatOneAttack one attack]] in particular where he disappears from the room, rendering himself invulnerable, and fires loads of bullet spreads from each corner of the room, all aimed at you, ''per second''. In addition, those who prefer to distance themselves from the High Priest and hug the walls and corners to avoid his attacks will be startled to find out that ''even those are firing projectiles at you,'' and you'll ''absolutely'' need to do this in order to stand a chance against him, let alone vie for the Master Round. Don't have a reliable long-range weapon to pelt him with? May Kaliber have mercy on you... |
| 291 | * The final boss from ''Eureka Seven Vol 1: The New Wave'' is just plain evil in both forms. Your first fight is against him on the ground while you pilot the Nirvash, the absolute worst LFO or KLF for this battle since it has no weapons and he has an 8 pod missile launcher and he hits just as hard as the Nirvash does. Your only defense is your excellent offense and your boomerang which are both pointless against his massive forefront blasts. The second part has you battling him in the air during lift combat which up until this point you had been in only one other one: The training Session for lift combat several chapters back. |
| 292 | * ''VideoGame/EVOSearchForEden'': |
| 293 | ** Queen Bee is a much nastier version of the King Bee from earlier in the stage, and he was pretty unpleasant. |
| 294 | ** The FinalBoss, [[spoiler: Bolbox]]. He's an eight form BossRush that pits you against seven previous creatures, all strengthened to various degrees and most of them can be considered their own boss while [[spoiler: Bolbox]] attacks with his hand. Luckily, there are two parts that can't even harm you and a few of the bosses being extremely easy, but dying once sends you to the map and, thankfully, you don't have to go through TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon again. You know that a boss is hard when a trick that fully heals you will still give you trouble if you didn't grind off of the [[spoiler: preserved Tyrasaurs]]. |
| 295 | * ''VideoGame/FreedomPlanet'' has several tough bosses. |
| 296 | ** Spade. He's not too hard if you're Lilac, and is fairly easy if you're Milla. If you're playing as Carol, however, he's one of the hardest bosses in the game, as she lacks the speed of Lilac to keep up with his FlashStep dashes, and she doesn't have a shield to reflect his projectiles like Milla does. What really hurts is the fact that his attack pattern seems designed to punish aggressive strategies, meaning you're only going to die that much faster if you try to chase after him. |
| 297 | ** Prince Dail's Thunderbird is particularly difficult as Lilac. His gimmick of using wind to blow you off the stage, coupled with his homing attacks, lasers that can cover all but a small percentage of the screen, the fact that you have to attack a dozen feathers as separate hit boxes to damage him, and his rush attacks that can down your health bar in four hits. What [[{{Pun}} pushes it over the edge]] for Lilac is her floaty jumps and Cyclones that previously used wind to her advantage can knock you to your death if you're not precise with your jumps. And that goes double for her Dragon Boost, which will get you killed two times out of three if not timed and used sparingly. Carol can at least use her special to cover a wide range to down his defenses and pass through attacks with her invincibility frames.\ |
| 298 | His Shadebeast in Battle Glacier is even worse. He spends most of the fight high above the ground where he's hard to reach. This isn't much of a problem for Carol as she can scale the walls, but Lilac needs to Dragon Boost up there, and the Dragon Boost requires a full gauge. And all this time, he's spamming BulletHell attacks. The only time he comes down to ground level is when he's preparing his most devastating attack. At least the [[FlunkyBoss mooks]] give you health. |
| 299 | ** On the flip side, there's Mega Serpentine as Carol. On a flat plane with one wall on the far right end, a boss that loves to spam BulletHell attacks, and gets his own temporary invincible shield, it's as if designed to be as counterproductive with her melee attacks as possible. And since he loves to run off once hit, there's no hope of spamming a sustained special attack, unlike with Lilac who can quickly catch up to him. |
| 300 | ** [[BigBad Lord Brevon]]'s second phase is probably one of the most difficult boss battles in the game, particularly with Lilac and Carol. His mech moves fairly quickly, its attacks are extremely unpredictable, and its arm cannon follows you as it shoots at you, plus it has an attack where it gathers lots of energy and releases it across much of the area. |
| 301 | ** Brevon's third and final phase is considered ridiculously hard, even by FinalBoss standards. He moves quickly, throws out attacks with great rapidity, and has an attack that can shave off half of your health that comes out with little warning. The creators took note of this and toned him down in a later patch as they considered the huge number of player deaths to him unacceptable[[note]]Only on Normal Mode, though; he was not nerfed at all in Hard Mode[[/note]]. Even with the nerf, he's ''still'' far and away the hardest boss in the game, which especially doesn't help the fact that he's also the most despicable villain in an otherwise-lighthearted game as well. |
| 302 | * ''VideoGame/{{Frogger}} Beyond'': |
| 303 | ** The game has some fairly difficult bosses, but the Claw [[note]]Think a demonic, oversized disembodied skill crane[[/note]] completely stops the game right then and there. The battle consists of pressing buttons 1 to 4 in order, while avoiding its fireballs. Sounds easy? Not one bit. The first phase is so easy it's not even funny. Then comes the second phase, which is a huge leap in difficulty. Not only are the switches out of order, but there's a lot of missing spaces and moving platforms. Its attack is firing a row of fireballs in a single line, which can easily hit Frogger if the fireballs are in the line of a moving platform. The third phase? It's a borderline LuckBasedMission. The buttons are not only out of order, ''but constantly move'', there's less actual space and more moving platforms, and the claw gains a nigh-unavoidable [[ThatOneAttack cluster of fireballs]] that is extremely difficult to dodge. It's also full of FakeDifficulty because you most likely don't get a chance to analyze its pattern ''at all'' before being hit. Oh yeah, Frogger has {{one hit point|wonder}}, so get hit once and it's back to the beginning. If there's one good thing about the boss, it won't attack when Frogger is on a moving platform. |
| 304 | ** The tank boss in World 4. It's surrounded by four spiked shields, so you obviously have to remove them. How? With a bit of the old MisguidedMissile strategy. Unfortunately, the shield power units are guarded by pillars of ice that are quite difficult to work around, and are put up randomly. And it's all compounded by the fact that it's typically shooting lots of mortars at you before it decides to shoot a missile. And when you ''finally'' remove all the shields, you not only have to deal with the mortars and keep directing the missile, you ''also'' have to deal with the tank moving around, trying to run you over! And the target is the tank itself this time, so good luck trying to get it. And just like before, getting hit just once starts the whole nonsense over. |
| 305 | ** The Octopus in World 2 is a massive DifficultySpike from the previous one. You're moving around a circular arena trying to dodge its tentacles, which sometimes move around, slap the ground, or alternate between being raised and on the ground. It only can be harmed when these floating exploding barrels appear and you have to navigate them and hit the switch... and then return before it explodes. The more hits it takes, the barrels require more difficult and quick platforming to get through or risk not making it back in time... and there's only three of them, so you have to deal with crossing its arms to reach all of them. Get hit? You know what happens. |
| 306 | * Azetlor on the [=PS3=]/360 versions of ''VideoGame/GhostbustersTheVideoGame'' is a real nasty piece of work, particularly on Professional Mode. |
| 307 | * ''VideoGame/AHatInTime'': |
| 308 | ** Snatcher is easily the hardest as he's the kind of boss who likes to saturate the entire battlefield with lots of swift attacks that can be difficult to get out of the way of even when you see them coming and, unlike other bosses, he's smart enough to ''swipe your hats'' and use your attacks against you, simply not turn blue and become vulnerable to attack (though you get around that soon enough), and realize dropping health-restoring hearts is a bad idea and ''really'' doesn't like to drop very many. When you ''do'' take him down though, seeing him plead for mercy and be beaten at his own contract game after such a fight and an entire chapter of him pressing you into further servitude is one of the most satisfying parts in the game. |
| 309 | ** Almost every boss becomes this in the [[HarderThanHard Death Wish]] mode, thanks to having a way beefed up arsenal of moves and fewers chances to strike them. And if you thought the original Snatcher fight wasn't hard enough, just wait for Snatcher EX or Ultra Snatcher. |
| 310 | * ''[[VideoGame/HouseOfTheDead The Typing of the Dead]]'': |
| 311 | ** The boss of Chapter 3, Tower. For the first phase, you are given a question and 3 answers; answer correctly and you damage it, answer incorrectly or take too long and you take damage. However, some of the questions can be confusing to answer and you don't have a lot of time. Then comes the second form, in which Tower's last head swims or burrows around and you have to type the phrase shown before it bites you. If you're in the pool, you have plenty of time, but if you're in the sand pit it's harder because the phrase doesn't show up until after the head surfaces, which leaves you very little time. |
| 312 | ** Then comes The Magician in Chapter 5. For the first part, you have to type its phrases quickly and ''without making mistakes.'' Miss and it's automatic damage for you. Then you have to cancel his fireball attack by typing 3 phrases in a short timespan before they hit you, and only then can you do damage to him. |
| 313 | * ''VideoGame/{{inFAMOUS}}'' has Kessler. While he IS the final boss, he reaches ridiculous levels of difficulty when playing on hard (for more reasons than just the difficulty being raised in general). His health is absolutely ridiculous (to the point where it has a checkpoint every 25%, and it can take nearly an hour to whittle him down all the way), and he dodges everything. Grenade hits are pure luck, and not consistent enough to be worth it. He automatically dodges missiles (your second most damaging attack, and best hope of killing him),and will charge you (followed immediately by killing you) if you try to get him with your Storm (though it can be used at one point in the fight when he summons drones. This is the only way to not die). So, you can only hit him with your basic lightning bolt. Bad enough as is. Add in the fact that he has SEVERAL attacks that will kill you instantly if you don't have full health or dodge, and a charging attack that allows him to evade your shots while rushing at you for an impressive swing. |
| 314 | * In ''VideoGame/JerseyDevil'', the giant octopus fought at the end of the "Monkey's Trail" mission is quite possibly the hardest boss in the game. At first, you can't hit him and can only see him swimming outside. Once you figure out how to draw him into the room [[spoiler: (by killing several of the smaller octopodes)]], all hell breaks loose. You see, there is one large hole in the center where the giant octopus' head comes in and eight more smaller holes around the room for its tentacles. The tentacles ''[[YouCanRunButYouCantHide can reach you anywhere in the room, no matter what!]]'' Oh, and good luck trying to dodge them while picking up TNT boxes to hit the boss with, for if you get hit, you will [[ArtificialStupidity automatically turn to face that tentacle and throw the TNT box in that direction if you happen to be holding one at the time]]. You're practically ''destined'' to lose ''at least'' one or two lives during this fight. |
| 315 | * The CoresAndTurretsBoss in Stage 3 of ''VideoGame/JourneyToSilius'' fires a complex pattern of lasers and bullets, making it much more difficult than other bosses, since you have to jump through the hail of fire to hit the core, and you are probably low on gun power at this point. |
| 316 | * The Minotaur, the underworld fortress guardian in ''Videogame/KidIcarus: Of Myth And Monsters''. He was as far as many players got with the game though his difficulty comes mostly from [[EarlyBirdBoss appearing when you most likely don't have access to any power ups and will lose them in one hit if you do]]. You fight him in a cramped area he constantly teleports around while throwing out an endless supply of skulls he has a much easier time hitting you with than you do hitting him with your non powered up arrows and he can attack from off screen. |
| 317 | * Of the three recurring bosses in ''VideoGame/LetItDie'', Jin-DIE is by far the cruelest. For starters, every arena you fight her in is multi-leveled and has many platforms to fall off of. She [[TeleportSpam warps all around the area]], pelting you with projectiles from afar only to blink away before you can get a good hit on her. Her [[WaveMotionGun ultimate attack]] does massive damage, can completely destroy your armor, and it pushes you back; if the damage doesn't kill you, the fall probably will. The cherry on top is that she heavily resists piercing damage, so you're forced to get in close with blunt or slashing weapons. |
| 318 | * ''VideoGame/{{Magicka}}'': |
| 319 | ** [[spoiler:Grimnir]] is hands-down the hardest boss in the game. Before you even fight him, you have to go through the Mind Duel, in which he pits you up against at least one of every enemy spellcaster in the game, in a tiny arena surrounded by a bottomless pit, with no time to recover in between. When the real battle starts, you're fighting on a tiny spit of land surrounded by another bottomless pit, with the confined space making it even easier than normal to hurt your friends at inopportune times, and VERY hard to dodge his attacks. He can shield himself, create an unkillable Ethereal duplicate that will mercilessly bombard you with projectile Spells, and can cast powerful Magicks including Rain (weakens Fire and makes it suicidal to use Lightning), Tornado (very hard to avoid, sends you off the edge if you go near it), and Conflagration (nearly impossible to avoid, deals ludicrous damage, sets you on fire, making you take damage over time and sometimes causing your character to panic and, more often than not, run off the edge). If you fall of the edge you lose any items you were carrying, so if you're going for a [[ThatOneSidequest Dragon Slayer]] run, good luck holding on to Gram. Oh, and you have to fight him twice, the second time without the Mind Duel but with the ability to summon two duplicates rather than just one. |
| 320 | ** The three Necromancers halfway through Chapter 9 are That One Miniboss, being harder than a lot of the "real" bosses. They're already [[FlunkyBoss accompanied]] by Wights, which are tough on their own, but will also be constantly summoning Zombies to create a massive horde of minions that will flood the screen within a minute. The real problem is that [[ReviveKillsZombie Life Spells hurt the Zombies]] but heal the Necromancers, so it's impossible to fight both at the same time. Your best (read: only) bet is to chuck Earth/Ice projectiles at the Necromancers as early and as often as possible and hope for the best. |
| 321 | ** The final boss, [[spoiler:Assatur]], definitely counts. You fight him immediately after two other boss fights, and when I say "immediately" I mean "if you don't cast a complicated Magick within a few seconds at the end of the second boss fight, he'll heal the boss back to full health and make you fight him again". If you do actually get to the final battle, you'll find that he's huge, immobile, defenceless, and only has a few attacks. But of the more powerful of those attacks, one is nearly impossible to avoid unless you stand in EXACTLY the right place and does massive damage, one causes extremely damaging explosions in completely random locations, and one appears instantly in the middle of the arena, instantly kills you if you're not far enough away, and can easily wipe out your group in seconds. This guy just doesn't know the meaning of the word "fair". |
| 322 | * ''VideoGame/{{Magicka}}: The Stars Are Left'' is specifically meant to be harder than the original game, to the point where all of the bosses count as this to some degree: |
| 323 | ** Parker is constantly spawning annoying minions, is hard to get close to, and her web attack will paralyse and subsequently insta-kill you unless you burn your way out very quickly. |
| 324 | ** Dagon will never ever stop chasing you. If he gets close to you, he hits HARD, so you'll usually be to busy running away to actually attack him. He also has [[ThatOneAttack one nasty attack]] which is hard to see coming and will almost always kill you instantly. The kicker? You have to fight him THREE TIMES. |
| 325 | ** [[spoiler:Cthulhu]], however, blows all the other examples from the game out of the water. Yes, even [[spoiler:Grimnir]]. You have a ''tiny'' space in which to fight him (as usual, going of the edge kills you), and most of the time you can't even get close to the edge of the top half without getting pulled off by his tentacles. He can hit you from any angle, summon minions, has an attack that will instantly kill you if you're in front of him and don't react very quickly. To top it off, halfway through the fight he drops Dagon in to the arena, making you fight TWO BOSSES AT ONCE. |
| 326 | * ''VideoGame/MarvelUltimateAlliance'': |
| 327 | ** While the first game is fairly easy, the Mandarin is an incredibly tedious and irksome boss fight. He spends most of the fight in secret rooms you have to access via teleporter. The problem is if you use the teleporter, the Ultimo will follow you in and pull you back out. The way to override this to get one of the exploding bugs into the teleporter with Ultimo so it explodes on him which is... difficult. |
| 328 | ** The second game sics ComicBook/{{Magneto}} and ComicBook/{{Quicksilver}} on you AT THE SAME TIME. |
| 329 | * ''VideoGame/MetalGearRisingRevengeance'': All the bosses are fairly tough. |
| 330 | ** The ''cheapest'' is Monsoon, a good example of what happens when you combine a boss that was already a LightningBruiser and an invulnerability mode that you have to block the attacks of in order to even get a shot at. Oh yeah, and he's a master of long range and has a TeleportSpam attack. |
| 331 | ** The FinalBoss is nothing but pain and torment. He has difficult-to-avoid attacks that absolutely wreck Raiden even at full health, a few long-range attacks that are all different, but come out the same. He has twice as much health as every other boss in the game (and can heal until you cut his back) and is only vulnerable when he's setting up an attack. He has a painful grabbing attack that leaves Raiden vulnerable, and can chuck pieces of debris that must be sliced ''precisely'' or say good bye to 70% of your health. and the best part? No checkpoints. Also, only his punches and kicks can be parried; even on the Easy mode with auto parries, you can barely deflect 10% of this guy's attacks. It's even worse when playing Sam's DLC: With Raiden, he has the speed and essentially being able to continue his combo non-stop that a seasoned player can learn to handle the FinalBoss with relative ease. With Sam, you have dodge and counter. The worst part? The FinalBoss is far more aggressive and has new beefed up attacks that are unblock-able. Worse still is that Sam's parry requires stricter timing than Raiden's, meaning that if the player had trouble with parrying in the main game, Sam's DLC would be a nightmare. |
| 332 | * ''VideoGame/MuramasaTheDemonBlade'': |
| 333 | ** The Oni boss. You need to hide from all of its attacks, otherwise, kiss goodbye to approximately 4,000 health on Muso (Normal). Sure, there are rock piles for you to hide behind. But then there are all the little demons that, while they don't do any damage, cause you to stand up and reveal your hiding place. And the way the controls are set up, attacking makes one travel out from behind. Oh, and the boss can knock over your hiding places. Given that even without grinding you have about 6K health at this point, still... lots of healing to be had. And if you haven't gotten around to buying some of the higher-ranked healing items, this can take a while... and you'll likely get picked up again. Oh, and it has a health upgrade from the previous bosses. |
| 334 | ** The Dragon boss is big, has more invulnerability frames than you'd think, regularly blackens the screen and turns invulnerable, sprays enough projectiles to turn the game into a bullet-hell shooter, not all of which are deflectable, leading to many broken weapons, and, just to put the cherry on top, has a nasty OneHitKO that's hard to dodge, fills the screen, and turns him invulnerable while spawning projectiles when it charges up. |
| 335 | * ''VideoGame/NightmareCreatures'' has the Sewer Snake as the very first boss. This snake has five heads which shoot out bursts of flame at ridiculous speeds as its first stage attack. This means that your character is going to be spending a LOT of time lying on the ground [[ManOnFire while engulfed in flames.]] The second stage (should your character survive the inferno long enough to knock down the five support beams) is spent trying to attack the heads of the snake as it moves around the fighting area. This is the first boss fight. |
| 336 | * King Fury in ''VideoGame/{{Okamiden}}''. The first problem: he flies, so it can be difficult to hit him with a normal attack. Second: he's absurdly fast. Third: your partner has to spend most of the fight standing in front of a control panel and King Fury apparently knows he can only take 3 hits, because he specifically targets him over Chibi, turning the fight into an EscortMission as well. But the biggest problem? ''[[ScrappyMechanic Ink no longer regenerates]]''. You have to counter almost every move King Fury makes with one or two brush techniques, and if you're lucky, you can hit him maybe once or twice every time you knock him down. This means it takes a ''lot'' of ink to do a little damage, so you'll probably run out of Spirit Ink before long. And then you get him down to half hitpoints, and he summons a clone. |
| 337 | * ''VideoGame/OnimushaDawnOfDreams'' brings us Sakon. He actually gets easy the second and third times you fight him, but the first time is one of the most annoying battles in the game. The cell you're in is rather small and being near Sakon is enough to get you killed thanks to his monster aura. Doesn't help his sword as a massively unfair range. If you can't go Oni and get caught, you are going to be destroyed, '''hard.''' |
| 338 | * In ''VideoGame/OriAndTheWillOfTheWisps'', most of the bosses present a fair challenge. Not so with [[BrainwashedAndCrazy Possessed Kwolok]], whom the consensus says is the game's most frustrating boss. His melee attacks, which include hand slaps, tongue strikes, and CombatTentacles that project from the ground and walls, have very short notice before they hit, forcing the player to choose between the risk of [[InstantDeathRadius getting kited at close range]] and expending {{Mana}} on ranged attacks. His similarly hard-to predict body slam attack generates a wave of fire and will also create a crater of SpikesOfDoom if he does it in the middle of the arena. Things only get worse [[TurnsRed in the second half of the battle]], when the arena floods, preventing you from using the [[HealThyself Regenerate ability]], so the only way to restore HP is via RandomDrops from the aforementioned tentacles. This is also where he uses ThatOneAttack, a volley of "dark matter" projectiles that leave poisonous trails in the water for several seconds. On top of that, unlike the other two major bosses (Mora and Shriek), [[CheckPointStarvation there are no mid-fight checkpoints]], so you have to start the battle from the beginning if you die during the second phase. |
| 339 | * The first ''VideoGame/PacManWorld'' game brings us Anubis Rex and the King Galaxian. |
| 340 | ** The first phase of Anubis's fight, which takes place in a small corridor where he chases Pac-Man from a first-person perspective, isn't terribly difficult (although it's very easy to run over a spear). Once you exit the corridor, however, your ass is grass. You have to damage him by first [[AttackItsWeakPoint exposing its heart]] by using rev-roll switches placed above lava that shoots fireballs. The first time you hit him, he starts hurling miniature tornadoes at you, which requires precise butt bouncing. The second time you hit him, fireballs start dropping out of the sky and land on the rev-roll platforms, requiring you to jump and start over with activating the switch. The third time has him fire a ''laser'' from his forehead, which has a ''very'' wide hitbox and requires even more impeccable timing than the tornado. But here's the kicker: ''none of the projectiles go away when the next one activates.'' This means that during the final phase, you have to stand still and activate each switch, which takes five seconds each, all while avoiding a small tornado, a gigantic laser, and about fifty dozen flaming rocks jumping at you, ''all at the same time.'' And we might as well mention that Anubis Rex is the ''[[NintendoHard second boss of the game.]]'' |
| 341 | ** King Galaxian, while not nearly as annoying as Anubis Rex, is still pretty bad. First off, UnexpectedShmupLevel. Second, before you even fight him, you have to survive a ''level,'' filled with King Galaxian's drones, an asteroid field, and a giant battleship. Third, [[CheckPointStarvation there is exactly one easy-to-miss checkpoint halfway through the level.]] Finally, the boss himself is no slouch either, requiring you to dodge dozens of photon shots and drones before you can take out his eyes. |
| 342 | ** And then there's [[TheDragon Blinky]] (called [[DubNameChange Clyde]] since Pac-Man Arrangement) in ''Pac Man World 2''. His fight is [[RecurringBoss almost exactly the same as the two before him]], but there are a few minor differences that will make you screw up ''big time,'' the first of which is him being able to place flames on the ground with his fireballs and his ramming attack. The biggest problem with this is that the flames are practically ''invisible.'' You have to squint ''really'' hard in order to make them out, and there's likely to be at least seven or eight of them on the platform at once. Next, the speed at which he spits fireballs at you is just stupid fast. Unless you have split-second reflexes, prepare to get shot plenty of times. He can ''stunlock you to death'' with the fireballs if they connect at the right moment. As an added bonus, Blinky's machine can't be damaged by rev-rolls like the last two; you HAVE to wait until he comes down and butt-bash the glass cockpit. Cue RageQuit at the next corner... |
| 343 | * [[spoiler: The Surpreme Hunter (the second time you fight him]] from ''VideoGame/{{Prototype}}'', ''especially'' on Hard. For starters, he has a truly ridiculous amount of health, so much health that the game hands you tons of 500 pound bombs and ''aircraft'' to throw at him, and it ''still'' barely hurts him. Rocket launchers and helicopter missiles are next to useless against him, but apparently no one told the soldiers on the USS Reagan, because the entire time you're fighting him there are explosions slamming into both of you. He can take it fine, whereas ''you'' get knocked around and have huge amounts of your health taken off. The boss's attacks are all extremely damaging, and at least one of them is unblockable. However, the worst part is the ''time limit'', which is ridiculously strict. You have to execute everything ''perfectly'' to defeat the boss in the tiny amount of time you're given. If you are hit by two rockets or ''one'' of the boss's attacks over the course of the fight, you may as well start the fight over, since you just wasted too much getting up from the knockback animation and your character (along with New York City) is now [[spoiler: a nuclear crater.]] |
| 344 | * ''VideoGame/RabiRibi'', already a game chock full of EasyLevelsHardBosses, has a few that stand out in particular: |
| 345 | ** [[MirrorBoss Illusion Alius II]] comes soon after Chapter 3 begins and is hard primarily for two reasons: 1. It comes immediately after a MiniBoss battle with [[spoiler:the two flash-shooting nerds followed by a squad of [[spoiler:more nerds]] who have less HP but are just as deadly, and [[DroughtLevelOfDoom with no heal points during this entire ordeal]]. 2. Unlike its previous iteration, this boss now has access to the hammer. In a game where most of the bosses like to hang back and fire bullet hell at you, this chick just straight up bum rushes you and can combo you with her hammer for an obscene amount of damage (at ''least'' 200 HP if it all connects; you'll probably have around 250-300 HP depending on how many HP upgrades you've bought and found, for reference). You'll either need to be very good at not getting hit, or have to reload to your last non-automatic save and do the whole [[spoiler:nerds]] barrage again without getting hit so as to maximize HP for this fight. Did we mention that every single one of her attacks slaps you with a debuff that reduces your attack and defense? After you beat her, you'll have to fight the mirror Ribbon, and it really says something when that's the ''much'' easier half of the battle. |
| 346 | ** Illusion Alius III, who comes soon after Chapter 4 begins, also qualifies for much the same reasons. What makes her worse than the previous one is that she now has access to the air dash, and will use it completely out of nowhere with no warning whatsoever. And unlike ''your'' air dash, it's lightning fast and travels the length of the screen. She also has all the same tactics the previous version used. To make matters worse, before you can even get to her you have to deal with a ''much'' longer sequence full of [[spoiler: nerds]], including two MiniBoss battles with groups of them. Fortunately you do get to heal some health in the interim during the pre-fight with [[spoiler: Noah]], but it isn't much, and it relies on you not getting hit by ''her'' too! [[SarcasmMode Have fun!]] |
| 347 | ** Illusion Alius IV, [[spoiler:the last boss encountered during the BossRush in Forgotten Cave II]]. While you have a full arsenal by now, she has another trick up on her sleeve. Her attacks can cause Unstable, a status effect that will increase or decrease your speed at complete random, making controlling yourself almost nigh-impossible. She will then take advantage of your current state to hit you with her hammer for around 500+ damage (While your HP should be at around 1000). |
| 348 | ** Syaro is encountered in the [[spoiler:System Interior]] within the same chapter, and like all other enemies in the area, she is [[NoSell immune]] to melee attacks, forcing you to use your weaker ranged attacks to damage her. |
| 349 | ** [[spoiler: Miru]] for the exact opposite reason as Syaro. You're without Ribbon for this fight, meaning you'll have to resort to melee attacks. And she is ''not'' a boss you want to stay close to. She also has a nice little buff throughout the fight called "Bunny Lover", which cuts all damage you do to her in half. While she does get a defense debuff after a certain point in the fight, she ''also'' gets damage buffs as you deal damage to her, and she's already quite powerful to begin with.\ |
| 350 | \ |
| 351 | In a MinimalistRun, you can simply rely on Ribbon for damage for most bosses, and the Ribbon fight herself is literally an [[WinsByDoingAbsolutelyNothing automatic win]] (her HP will automatically deplete). No such mercy when fighting [[spoiler:Miru]] exists, however, as the fight still disables Ribbon's attacks and offers absolutely nothing to make the fight easier (other than a low boss level in the standard level-up mode that applies to all other bosses) on a no-hammer run. Hope you have [[MarathonBoss a lot of patience]] and proficiency with Super Carrots! And if you're fighting with no items, you're in even more trouble because your only method of attack is the Bunny Amulet. |
| 352 | ** Pandora from the Golden Pyramid deserves a mention for spending most of her battle in the air, forcing you to rely mostly on Ribbon's ranged attacks. The real key to beating her is micromanaging your SP meter so that you can hit her with Erina's hammer combos during the brief time she's on the ground. Add in the fact that she's the boss of ThatOneLevel, and that leaving her chamber to grab more items will force you to retrace your steps through a long corridor filled with [[ScrappyMechanic searchlights you have to wait to pass over]] on the return journey, and you have the perfect recipe for ThatOneBoss. Oh, did we mention there is an Illusion Pandora in the lower sections of the Pyramid, who is even stronger? And that Illusion Pandora has multiple attacks that are essentially ''impossible to dodge''? And that she has far more health than the regular version? [[ThisIsGonnaSuck Good luck fighting her, you will need it.]] |
| 353 | ** [[spoiler: Miriam]] is the only boss that actively punishes you for completion (beyond the normal "bosses level up as you do" thing,) as every single power-up adds to her list of moves, and she copies the effects of every badge you have. And that incredibly useful badge that prevents contact damage with bosses and you're likely never taking off? Having it equipped gives her the Bunny Lover buff. Even carrying food is a bad idea, because she can use ''that'' against you. And you'd think she'd be easier in a 0% items run because of her lack of moves, right? Think again. She still has her worst attack since you always have the Bunny Amulet, an attack that brings a series of copies of other bosses to attack you. Even though each copy will disappear after a bit, she summons enough of them for the attack to go on for a long time. And while you can easily withstand her first use of it by having all buffs, this boss is different from the other postgame bosses in which she is actually buffed in 0% items, specifically by being made [[WhyWontYouDie much harder to kill]], so she will eventually cycle back to the Bunny Amulet again, when your buffs have ran out so you'll die in three hits even in Casual Mode, and you've just spent literal minutes continually attacking her, so if you die there, it will take a while to go back to that phase. The next post-game boss is actually much easier in this sort of run. |
| 354 | * The giant vampire boss from Horror Island, the third level of ''VideoGame/RainbowIslands''. It was infamous in its day. |
| 355 | * ''Franchise/RatchetAndClank'': |
| 356 | ** Chairman Drek from [[VideoGame/RatchetAndClank2002 the first game]] is infamous for how hard he is. Many people say they had to buy the {{BFG}} of the game series, the RYNO, to beat him without losing their sanity. |
| 357 | ** Dr. Nefarious in [[VideoGame/RatchetAndClankUpYourArsenal the third game]] can be a ''real'' challenge the first few times around, especially if you haven't leveled up your weapons enough. |
| 358 | ** [[spoiler:Luna]] in ''[[VideoGame/RatchetAndClankSizeMatters Size Matters]]'' is ridiculous. The battle starts off with a "run towards the camera while dodging the rocks and were-sheep" section that seems to last forever. Then, you fall on a platform and she will shoot at the cliff nearby, with you having to dodge rocks falling on the platform. Then, when you actually get to the battle, she will promptly run you over and spam rockets, and her vehicle has a ton of health. And every time you lose, it's right back through the running section. |
| 359 | ** [[spoiler:Klunk]] in ''[[VideoGame/SecretAgentClank Secret Agent Clank's]]'' Challenge Mode. He can kill you in 4 hits, your weapons do barely any damage to him whatsoever even as Level 4 Proto Weapons, and every time you die you have to start from scratch. Even the Dallas Chalice won't help you much, since you can only use it once during the fight. |
| 360 | * ''VideoGame/{{Rayman}}'': |
| 361 | ** Nearly all of the boss fights from the first game are pretty hard, but some of them just take the cake. Perhaps the best examples include Space Mama and Mr. Skops; Space Mama dishes out a merciless assault of fast, hard-to-dodge attacks while Mr. Skops has a homing attack that is nearly impossible to dodge. Also, [[DualBoss one part]] of the [[SequentialBoss Sequential]] FinalBoss fight is ridiculously hard, especially when compared to the rest of the phases -- including the final one. |
| 362 | ** ''VideoGame/RaymanOrigins'' has Murray. He's a very large target that takes up half the screen and fills ''that'' small space with smaller worm-like creatures. On his final attack, if you don't move out of the way or strike the weak point, it's a OneHitKill with a large hitbox; the fact that Murray [[TrialAndErrorGameplay comes barreling out of the side of the screen with little warning]] really doesn't help. While the underwater controls are actually ''good'' in this game, that's merely a consolation. |
| 363 | ** ''VideoGame/RaymanLegends'' has the Hades' Hand, the fifth world's boss. You have to fight it with the fist projectiles, it's very difficult to avoid (but other than CollisionDamage, it has no other attacks), and you have to fight it three times. The first, it takes the form of a giant hand, and it chases you around the sloped arena that is tough to navigate in. The second, you have to fight in mid-air, there are two flying entities, and there are also two giant sawblades right in the middle. The final is the worst. It's a giant target that you have to fight on three tiny floating platforms, and it takes memorizing its movements to survive. Also, you have to go through a tricky platforming section between each phase. |
| 364 | * Verdugo in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4''; it is Tyrant hybridized with the Franchise/{{Predator}}. Extremely fast, damaging, and {{nigh invulnerable}} when not frozen by liquid nitrogen, and its attacks must be dodged in {{quick time event}}s most of the time. There's only four LN2 canisters to freeze him, so don't waste them. Luckily, if you saved the freebie rocket launcher from earlier, you can OneHitKill him. |
| 365 | * The fight with the Tyrant on board the plane in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvilCodeVeronica''. As usual, it's MadeOfIron and a LightningBruiser, but this time, there's hardly any room to maneuver. There is also an element of PuzzleBoss where you have to use the catapult to throw it out of the plane after weakening it with your weapons, if it's not damaged enough, it will throw the crate back at you. |
| 366 | * The final boss, Greedy, from ''VideoGame/{{Ristar}}''. Let's check his three forms shall we? |
| 367 | ** At first, he refuses to even fight you, throwing up five, newly introduced and unique to this fight, teleporting mooks, which move in random directions and fire energy weapons in your general direction. They also move REALLY quickly. If the RandomNumberGod is not in your favour today, this sequence alone can be an absolute nightmare. |
| 368 | ** When the mooks are disposed of, he finally rises out of his chair and... teleports. [[TeleportSpam Constantly.]] Oh, and he's quicker than the enemies. Successfully hitting him will result in... [[MookMaker Greedy spawning more enemies to deal with.]] And [[AIRoulette if luck is not with you]] he will either dodge out of the way of your attacks, or summon a [[HumanShield shield of mooks]]. This shield is thrown, one particle at a time, in your general direction. And don't think this doesn't work as a shield either, if you hit him whilst this shield is up, [[YouAreAlreadyDead you are screwed.]] The shield is fully repaired, Greedy starts to teleport with the shield still up, AND he throws EVEN MORE enemies at you. |
| 369 | ** After a few hits, Greedy stops messing around, and the [[TurnsRed real fun starts]]. In his third form, he can now summon [[OneHitKill black holes]], and fry the floor with lightning. Oh. And he's even quicker than before. Getting through this fight unscathed without PauseScumming is a considerable feat. |
| 370 | * The [[GiantEnemyCrab Rattlecrab]] in ''VideoGame/{{Scaler}}'' -- an [[UnexpectedShmupLevel Unexpected Shmup Boss]], which is fought from a first person mode using [[GiantFlyer Reppy]], whose attacks only [[CherryTapping chip away at the Rattlecrab's health]]. What makes it worse is that you can't take many hits, health is extremely scarce (as in 'there's-only-one-place-full-of-hard-to-hit-[[RewardingVandalism cocoons]]'), and after a while the boss starts [[FlunkyBoss shooting out enemies at you]] which ''must'' be hit, otherwise you'll be brought down very quickly. And once you are, well it's back the start of the fight and chipping away health again! |
| 371 | * ''VideoGame/ScarfaceTheWorldIsYours'': |
| 372 | ** Colosis is undoubtedly the hardest boss in the whole game. Not only is quick to cover himself in the walls and boxes, he can survive a staggering number of bullets, he sends you to a lot of henchmen at his disposal, and he shoots you with a grenade launcher that could easily kill you with one or two shots. |
| 373 | ** [[spoiler:[[FinalBoss Sosa]] himself can be one if you refuse to attack him with rage mode. He can survive a staggering number of bullets and shoots you with a Deagle, the most powerful handgun in the game.]] |
| 374 | * The vampire from ''VideoGame/SeveranceBladeOfDarkness''. A lot of HP, powerfull attacks, drains your life, teleports behind you and has a strong shield that deals massive damage to you if you hit. And you WILL hit it, since he has his guard raised most of the time. And you fight this bastard several times. If you go back to previous levels for OneHundredPercentCompletion by collecting every PlotCoupon to unlock the SwordBeam on the InfinityPlusOneSword he pops up as a BossInMookClothing several more times, with less health but still holding that frigging shield (which you never get to pick up). |
| 375 | * The ''VideoGame/SharkTale'' game has Lenny, who can take off large chunks of health with every attack, has a dangerous attack pattern that allows him to throw out several fast, hard-hitting attacks that can ''stunlock'' Oscar and take even more health off if he's not careful, and has an especially dangerous attack he loves to spam which, although heavily telegraphed, can take out an entire health bar if Oscar incorrectly guesses which area he'll strike. Ironically, this fight was based on a scene in the [[WesternAnimation/SharkTale movie]] where their confrontation was ''faked''! |
| 376 | * ''VideoGame/ShovelKnight'' is no stranger to tough-as-nails bosses, as the following Order of No Quarter members can attest: |
| 377 | ** Polar Knight. Whether he's hurdling giant snowballs in your face, blocking your downward air stomps, sending a rain of icy stalactites onto your head or even ''digging up instant-kill spikes from the ground at whim,'' there's something to be said about the cheapness of his encounters. |
| 378 | ** Propeller Knight backs up his [[ThatOneLevel already immeasurably irritating stage difficulty]] with a difficult fight to boot. The first phase where he jabs at you a few times isn't too bad, but after a few hits he calls in his airship and destroys part of the floor, leaving you to deal with a barrage of cannonballs and two insta-death bottomless pits while simultaneously jabbing at you, pushing/pulling you towards said pits, and countering your air strikes by blowing you sky high and impaling you on the way back down. Defeating him normally is a challenge in and of itself, but doing so without relics is practically suicide. |
| 379 | ** Specter Knight is quick with his movements, and halfway through, he makes the arena dark, with a flash occurring every few seconds. That is ''Shovel of Hope'' and ''Plague of Shadows.'' His boss fight in ''King of Cards'' has his fight changed to him from his ''Specter of Torment'' appearance. While darkness is no longer a problem, that does not mean Specter Knight is holding back; like Shovel Knight in ''Plague of Shadows,'' he uses curios, meaning he can throw two blades that can go up walls, use his slash attack on King Knight, call an enemy to shoot fireballs, go after you with his Dread Talon, and climb up walls. And then in the second battle, he has a second phase in which you need to fight his ''Shovel of Hope/Plague of Shadows'' boss form, and due to the sheer amount of black in the arena he's fought in, it makes it even worse than ''Shovel of Hope'' and ''Plague of Shadows'' when he turns out the lights. |
| 380 | ** Tinker Knight's second form was hard in ''Shovel Of Hope'' and ''Plague Of Shadows'', with you constantly having to jump on moving missiles and avoid the missiles on the shoulder part of the [[spoiler: Tinker Tank]]. '''HOWEVER''', in ''Specter Of Torment'', the battle is '''even harder,''' even if you go after Tinker Knight first. For starters, Tinker Knight uses the Mobile Gear and chases after you with it, which causes you to take damage if even the spire part of the Mobile Gear touches you. After dealing with that, the [[spoiler: Tinker Tank]] still needs to be fought, but Tinker Knight is at least nice enough to send a platter containing a chicken and darkness skull to restore your health and darkness meters (similar to the ''Shovel Of Hope'' and ''Plague Of Shadows'' BossRush) so that you can be ready, and that causes that point to count as a checkpoint so that you don't have to deal with the first phase again. The [[spoiler: Tinker Tank]] is fought with the screen constantly scrolling, so you need to keep running to dodge the missiles. Tinker Knight is still on the Mobile Gear, and he throws wrenches, making it harder for you to hit him. These combined mean that Tinker Knight is not fooling around this time and means serious business. |
| 381 | * ''VideoGame/Shrek2'': Puss in Boots makes up for his poor showing in the [[WesternAnimation/Shrek2 movie]] by being a tough rhythm-based boss where you must push buttons to dodge his attacks and hit him. He also takes [[DamageSpongeBoss a lot of damage]] before he finally goes down. |
| 382 | * ''VideoGame/Siren1'' had two outstanding MadeOfIron [[MarathonBoss marathon bosses]]: |
| 383 | ** The FinalBoss is much easier to beat if you're not going for OneHundredPercentCompletion. If you ''are'', then you don't get to use the special item that calls a meteor down upon [[spoiler: Datatshushi]] to kill it off. You can only use it twice, and must use a special sword to finish the battle. Unfortunately, [[SurvivalHorror being the type of game that it is]], melee combat is very awkward, and since the FinalBoss flies above you at all times, you have to aim ''up'' to hit it with the sword. This battle seems to take forever; it's possible that enemies regenerate health in this game. |
| 384 | ** Takeuchi's interminable fight against [[spoiler: Shibito Akira]]. It's an incredibly long and difficult duel between Takeuchi, who only has a pistol, and [[spoiler: Akira]], who has a rifle. It takes place on a small battlefield where you can mercifully take cover if you need to regenerate your health. |
| 385 | * The DualBoss battle with the Torturer and Deviant 1 in ''VideoGame/SoldierOfFortune II''. Deviant 1 attacks with a sniper rifle, while the Torturer is MadeOfIron and armed with an instant-death M60 machine gun, and there's almost nowhere to hide. |
| 386 | * Smiling Big Boo, the Boss of Chateau de la Terre, in ''VideoGame/{{Something}}'' is hard because of the limited throw blocks, contact damage from the Big Boo himself and the smasher covering a large portion of the boss arena. |
| 387 | * ''VideoGame/SunsetRiders'': |
| 388 | ** Most bosses have fairly easy patterns to deal with once you figure them out. Chief Scalpem (renamed [[{{Bowdlerize}} Chief Wigwam]] in the SNES version) is not one of these bosses, as his pattern involves jumping all over the place and throwing knives freakin' everywhere. Next to the final boss, he's the hardest boss in the game, and the final boss is only hard because he takes an ungodly amount of bullets to kill, not because he has difficult attack patterns. As an added "fuck you" by Konami, [[KarmaHoudini he's also the one boss that you don't even get the pleasure of finishing off]], as his [[MoralityPet cute little sister]] runs in and begs you not to kill him. |
| 389 | ** The Smith Brothers. If you don't have your weapon powered up (and you lose your upgrades when you die); you will have a hard time. Their combination of throwing bombs and lanterns at you will cost a lot of lives. Only through a combination of patience, a lot of jumping, flipping, and balancing on the chandelier at the center of the room can you beat them. |
| 390 | * ''VideoGame/ViewtifulJoe'': |
| 391 | ** Another Joe. An awesome boss in his own right, he has a knack for killing you without breaking a sweat. One of his attacks can decimate your health if you're unprepared for it, and if you run out of VFX while fending it off, your death is guaranteed. Made doubly frustrating as you end up having to fight him a second time at the end of a mandatory BossRush. |
| 392 | ** Fire Leo is the final boss at the end of the BossRush. His battle involves you using a shitload of Mach Speed to set YOURSELF on fire so you are immune to his fireballs (temporarily), rushing after the free-running bastard and pummeling him until he either jumps back into the lava surrounding the platform, or he decides to do his ridiculous ballerina twirl claw attack. Said attack gives you [[DodgeThis very little warning]] before he strikes (on harder difficulties, you get no warning whatsoever). Also, he runs around the platforms [[ThatOneAttack spewing giant rocks]] that will hurt and temporarily stun you if they land on you. The same rocks you have to punch ''to avoid being set on fire''. |
| 393 | * The Shadow Bros from ''VideoGame/VistaQuest'' are a real wake up call after the first boss, being the cakewalk he is. |
| 394 | * In the NES [[SugarWiki/NoProblemWithLicensedGames adaptation of]] ''VideoGame/{{Willow}}'', you have General Kael. If you try attacking him from the sides, he'll charge at you, dealing significant amounts of damage. Attacking him from the front leaves you open to his sword, also dealing a lot of damage. Standing still will have his sword deflected off of your shield; using that technique is crucial to survive the fight. |
| 395 | * The Wizard from ''VideoGame/WizardsAndWarriors''. It's not that he's ''difficult'', as the FinalBoss one would expect him to be more difficult than the others, but it's because unlike every other boss who is straight-forward and offers a legitimate challenge of your platforming, dodging, and equipment usage, the Wizard is [[FakeDifficulty difficult for all the wrong reasons]]. He teleports around a large room, about four screens worth, appearing in random locations and hurling projectiles at you while restoring one point of health every time he vanishes. You do not have enough time to get from one side of the room to the other before he vanishes (you simply don't move fast enough) and there are large circular platforms that he can appear inside where he is ''completely invulnerable'' (but can still hit you), meaning that most times it is actually impossible to hit him, which means he's basically just getting free chances to refill his health bar. Unlike every other fight this one boils down to [[LuckBasedMission sheer luck]], since at any time if the game feels like it he can just casually appear in unreachable places enough time to completely restore his health. |
| 396 | * ''VideoGame/ZoneOfTheEnders: The Second Runner'': |
| 397 | ** Nephtis. First off, none of your weapons damage her, the only way to damage her is to knock Nephtis into the surrounding scenery, this becomes most grating after the train sequence, where you're inside a cylindrical room with multiple levels, and nothing to grab onto to use as a suitable projectile/defence. There are large Clod robots all over the place which try to grab and hold you in place while Nephtis does its kamikaze run. The clods make it very hard to lock onto Nephtis, and her unpredictable flight path makes it hard to get a bead on her. |
| 398 | ** After that fight, [[spoiler: Nephtis' AI infects Ken's orbital frame, with Ken still inside.]] Unlike the rest of the game, you have to actually avoid attacking your enemy, because blowing up the robot will kill the pilot. The only way to win the fight is to parry the frame's melee strikes to leave her stunned and grab her afterwards so your AI can delete the virus. If you fly too far away –- or just get unlucky -– the AI can use an attack to drain its health in seconds. You need to make at least seven grabs, and even without damaging the enemy, she's plenty lethal to your frame on her own. |
| 399 | ** [[spoiler: The fused Anubis and Aumaan Anubis in the last level in the 360 version. You only have Zero Shift available, all other weapons had been destroyed in the trip. Including Vector Cannon which could bust through the boss's shields with ease.]] |
| 400 | ** The Vic Viper from the Special Edition. A variety of (yes, ''VideoGame/{{Gradius}}''-themed) attacks, including homing missiles and hard-to-dodge ripple lasers, all of which get multiplied in number when he starts bringing out Options later in the fight. In the later parts of the fight he starts putting up a shield that absorbs a lot of damage before going down. But the real problem is that Leo clearly TookALevelInBadass in between the two games, and is an absolute monster in close-combat. And as this is very early in the game, the only sub-weapon you have is Geyser, which is nigh-impossible to hit him with. |
| 401 | ** The first game had the Tyrant Orbital Frame. Absolutely impossible to fight until you get the Decoy sub-weapon, as he has 100%-accurate artillery lasers (though once you ''do'' get the Decoy, said lasers are a joke to avoid). The first part of the fight isn't too bad, but in the second half, he begins rocketting around the arena at extremely high speeds with amazing tracking and a shield up. Yeah, you can continue to use Decoy a few times, but you'll run out of ammo for it in a hurry if you do that every time he uses that move, and then you'll have to dodge anyway. He's also fond of homing energy blasts that stun you for a few seconds. |
| 402 | [[/folder]] |
| 403 |
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