Up For Grabs, Seen It A Million Times, Needs More Examples

Uh oh! Boss battle time! The hero has come this far, so no reason to back down now!

But what's this? Something doesn't seem right. The boss is taking so little damage, or maybe even no damage at all. His arena doesn't seem to have any flaws, and none of his attacks are turning back against him, neither. This is bad! What do we do?

The answer? Use his easily grab-able, explosive mooks against him. Boom! Now the boss has shown his weakpoint! You know where it goes from there.

Basically, when a boss has a weakness based on his accompanying mooks being used against him. It can come in various forms, such as that the mooks are thrown back at the boss or that their attacks are reflected onto him. Please note that it only fits the trope if the mooks are directly beneficial to the player. It is not a weakness if they just refill your life bar or keep you separated from the boss (defeating them leading up to a chance to hit the boss).

Sister trope of Boss Arena Idiocy. Helpful Mooks in boss battle practice. Compare Playing Tennis With The Boss for when the boss' attacks can be thrown back at them.

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Examples:

• Various games of the Yoshi's Island series have bosses that do this, all of which can be eaten to make eggs, which in turn can hurt the boss.
• Super Mario 64 DS has only Yoshi as a playable character at the start. As such, he cannot punch enemies, but he can swallow them to stock up on eggs to throw. Both King Bob-omb and Goomboss could not be beaten if they did not have their respective mooks to fuel Yoshi for eggs.
• Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 features the Bouldergeist, a ghost that encases itself within stone. Normally it would be invincible to Mario's attacks. However, during the fight it will occasionally throw a black rock at Mario, which will become a Bomb Boo, which in turn Mario can use against the Bouldergeist to break apart his stone casing.
  • When it reaches its vulnerable phase, guess what it still intentionally spawns?
• In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Diababa is regularly invincible to anything Link does to it when in its final phase. However, Ook swings in during the action of the boss fight for you to blow Bomblings into its face.
  • Justified in that it had no control over the Bomblings being present, and that Ook provides them in a way that benefits you.
• Recettear features several bosses that end up having mooks as their main downfall.
  • Reginald Drisby has bulking defenses when he normally runs around and attacks. Throughout the fight, Reginald will try to eat mushrooms to recover his HP. Red ones only benefit him. Purple ones, however, will leave him fallen and weak to attacks.
    • Justified in that the mooks do heal him, and that his recovering HP strategy makes him very hard to defeat, if not take a very long time.
  • Volcanicrab will literally take no damage from any of your attacks initially. Bomb mooks appear eventually, however, which can flip him over to strike his underside for massive damage.
• Early on in the final boss battle of Beyond Good And Evil, you can launch the mooks that are disguised as P'jey at it.
• Some of the bosses in Zuma's Revenge are like this. The only way you can kill the boss is to damage the mooks.