Goddamned Boss / Final Fantasy

• Final Fantasy IV has three of these, but it mostly happens in the game's 2D versions:
  • Dark Bahamut is probably the most sadistic boss of the game. First of all, he starts with a Megaflare and you can't prevent it, it's too fast. Then he casts Reflect on himself...and then he spams Flare. It's not even a joke. He constantly casts Flare on himself. And Slow does very little...because Flare is instantaneous. And don't summon or he'll cast another Megaflare. And like the cherry on the cake, he sometimes heals 6000 HP. Have fun!
  • Plague Horror's only attack is to cast Doom on the party, which can be annoying. By no means he's actually hard; he can very well be the easiest boss of the game. What's annoying is killing the characters and revive them. If you're fast enough, you can cast Reflect before he casts Doom and then you're set; he doesn't attack. I'll tell you something. He'll cast Haste on the characters, but it doesn't affect the timer.
  • Zeromus is perfectly manageable, but even veterans will find him spamming Black Hole, Big Bang, and sometimes Bio in the first phases of the battle very annoying. You will be glad when he'll start casting Meteor, because it hurts less and is prone to missing.
• Final Fantasy IV: The After Years:
  • FF3 Ahriman is exactly like Plague Horror in the prequel. Only this time...Haste does affect the timer. This Is Gonna Suck hard.
  • Remember, Dark Bahamut, who constantly spams Flare? Atomos constantly spams Meteor. But unlike the dragon, this bastard casts only Meteor...aaaaaand Firaga and Earthquake if you're lucky. And I mean it.
  • Deathgaze can be encountered only as a random encounter. Once you find him, he'll casts Death on the entire party, then goes physical, uses Blizzaga, Thundaga or Death again, then retreats, but his HP will remain the same (unless you leave the floor). He's not that hard actually. It's more a battle of patience and it can run thin.
• Final Fantasy VI:
  • Tunnel Armor, an early-game boss. You fight it with Locke and Celes in your party, but the fight requires you to constantly use Celes' Runic ability, to stop the boss' devastating magic attacks. If Celes skips a turn of Runic to attack, then the boss' magical abilities can easily knock them both down. This leaves it up to Locke to slowly chip down the thing's HP, stopping periodically to throw Tonics at Celes and chug some himself. It would be close to, or even an outright, That One Boss for unprepared players due to the aforementioned strong attacks. It becomes much easier if you use a Genji Glove to double Locke's offense, but getting one that early requires a bit of a Guide Dang It!. Additionally, if you left a certain chest unopened in your first run through the area and opened it when you're going through at this point, it will contain a Thunder Rod, which you can use as an item on the Tunnel Armor to use Thundara, which ends up killing it instantly.
  • Doom/Death Gaze. Let's see, he tries to pull a Total Party Kill a la Level 5 Doom Spell the moment the battle begins, occasionally cuts off shit-tons of health with Aero or Blizzaraga, can randomly cast Level 1 Doom Spell to kill one of your party members, and hightails it after less than 5 turns. Oh, and he can appear the moment you take flight in Daryl's airship, where he's likely twice your level and can kick your ass faster than you can say "what the hell was that thing?!". Oh, and when you do plan on fighting him and he flees, it can take forever to find him again. And don't think he'll just decide to stick around the second time around. Or the third. Or the fourth.
  • To clarify how hard it is to find him when you're deliberately looking, every time you use the airship he will randomly pick one pixel of the map to hide, and will attack you if you cross that particular pixel. Online recommendations to finding him usually involve having your airship pointed towards due North, and then very slightly turning left or right by about 1°, then doing nothing but heading forward. The very slight angle will eventually have you cross every part of the map. It typically takes about 10-20 minutes of doing nothing but pushing the forward button to find him this way, and you'll likely have to find him multiple times.
  • The MagiMaster / Magic Master at the top of the Fanatics' Tower / Cultists' Tower is an Optional Boss that is theoretically one of the hardest enemies in the game, but there are two simple tricks that let even a weak party beat him using only early game magic... eventually. The first trick is to cast Berserk on the boss, which makes him use nothing but weak physical attacks for the rest of the fight, with one exception. You can even follow this up by casting Vanish on all your party members, making them immune to physical attacks and making the boss completely harmless - until you hit that one exception. Being under Berserk status won't stop the boss's Taking You with Me casting of Ultima when he hits zero HP, and it hits hard enough to one-shot your whole party. The second trick is what lets a weak party survive: reducing the boss's MP to zero will kill it, and when it dies this way, it will still attempt to cast Ultima, but fail. Unfortunately, the boss has fifty thousand MP and the spell that damages enemy MP only does about 300-400 damage each time. Have fun!
• Final Fantasy VII:
  • "Bizarro Sephiroth" is fought in a unique multi-party battle and will constantly heal himself unless you figure out how to stop it, which requires using the secondary parties. It's easy enough if you know what you're doing, but if you don't you could end up there all day. And just setting up for the battle is a nuisance as you suddenly need to spread your equipment round all 6-8 characters not just three. Alternatively if you have Last Disc Magic such as Knights of the Round, Omnislash, or even 2xCut and W-Magic, you could just hit it faster than it can heal.
• Final Fantasy VIII:
  • Jumbo Cactuar and the Tonberry King. The first one is a veritable damage sponge that takes an hour to bring into low HP, and after that, it fucking escapes if you do not give him a very powerful finishing blow. If the bastard escapes, you have to start over. The Tonberry King by himself isn't very annoying, but you have to fight twenty normal Tonberries to initiate a fight with him. Tonberries are powerful and high-HP enemies, so twenty battles with them are basically guaranteed to be repetitively unleashing your most powerful GFs and Limit Breaks on them. Sitting and watching the animation. MANY.TIMES.OVER.
• Final Fantasy X:
  • One of the last bosses, Jecht, will, at the appropriate level, take ages due to the very long healing animation of the two columns supporting the boss throughout the fight. The heals are not that big, but the columns can't be taken out of commission permanently, respawning three rounds later with double health if they are killed, and there is no way to speed up the animation. This can be somewhat alleviated by casting Zombie-status on him, since he's not immune and will thus take damage from the heals. The slightly annoying thing is that the heal does take off the status effect, but still damages him before it's cleared, so it's not so bad.
  • Greater Sphere and Earth Eater become this if you are leveled up high enough to tackle them. The former counters every normal attack with Ultima, a spell that has the longest animation, guaranteeing that either you have watch that or overdrives and their animation ad nauseam, which on other hand are countered with Hydraulic Press, which is thankfully shorter but takes a percentage of character's maximum HP. Earth Eater on the other hand counters everything with Megaton Punch, an attack that inflicts instant death, so you have to witness that and an animation of Auto-Phoenix kicking in (which you most likely have if you bother with it) unless you use Deathproof armor on your characters. When on back, it counters everything with Flare that it bounces of its unremovable Reflect, so you have to watch the animation of the spell reflecting and spell itself. Both also must be vanquished multiple times if you want to maximize your luck (the only reason to bother with these two besides defeating each of them once for Monster Arena Quest completion), so have fun.
• Final Fantasy XII:
  • Vinuskar, the first of two bosses in the Stilshrine of Miriam. The boss itself isn't very difficult, especially compared to the boss after it, Mateus the Esper. However, it has a random gimmick where, upon entering the fight, characters are slowed down if they have metal equipped, which comes out of no where and isn't very well explained in game at all. Basically you need to switch to non-metal items to win, which is such a small number of items that you can potentially be unable to beat the boss quick enough simply because your characters are unable to act fast enough. If you prepare for that mechanic though, the fight is a joke by comparison.
  • The Trickster mark isn't particularly difficult, especially if you put it off until later in the game. The catch is getting it to hold still because it continually runs around the area, leaving your party to run after it and get in a single hit as it turns and comes back.
  • The 5 Mandragoras fought in the Sochen Cave Palace are highly unlikely to actually pose a serious threat, as even with their combined totals their stats are low, especially for the point you encounter them. That does not mean that they won't make you work for your victory, as their preferred tactic is to disperse themselves across the arena and inflict several Status Effects whenever someone gets close, then run away again and possibly heal.
  • Chaos, found in the Necrohol of Nabudis, isn't super hard compared to most of the late game optional Espers. However, he randomly shuts off the ability to attack him, meaning you have to rely on everything but your attack command to fight him. Combined with his earth weakness being something only weapons can do, unless you have the Telekinesis Technique to enable your melee fighters to attack him without issue, the fight is a slog to win because of that, which is not helped by his Limit Break move inflicting status debuffs that force your team to focus on removing them over him.
• Final Fantasy XIII:
  • The Warmech you fight at Chapter 12's beginning. Initially, it's an easy fight, but if you take too long to kill it, it'll put up an unbreakable force field. Getting rid of the force field requires you to stagger it, which can take up to fifteen minutes. Unless one knows a fast way to kill it.
  • The second fight with the Proudclad. It's a boss with 3.5 million HP, it's immune to all status ailments, and it can reset its stagger meter by changing form, which it can do whenever it feels like. And, once you get it down to about one million HP, it heals to full, gets perma-Brave, Faith, and Vigilance, and breaks out some new attacks (thankfully, it Deshells and Deprotects itself too). It's not powerful enough to really be a threat if you keep up with your healing, but it takes so long to fight that it's just a massive pain.
  • Most of the Eidolon battles. Theoretically they shouldn't be too difficult because you win just by using certain abilities until a gauge is filled (like using Sentinel abilities during the fight with the Shiva sisters), but you only have one or two party members who are inflicted with Doom, giving you a time limit, and while the Eidolons aren't defeated like normal bosses you can still be killed. This is especially a problem when Hope faces off solo against the Eidolon Alexander.
  • The final form of the final boss, Orphan. It's immune to all forms of attack until it's staggered, and it inflicts Doom on your party leader, leaving you with seven minutes to cut down its 3.3 million HP. It would be reasonable, except that it can use Temporal Hollow to reset the chain gauge basically whenever it feels like it.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2 also has the Paradox Scope fights with Caius, all of which are time-consuming and easy to mess up. In the Oerba 200 AF fight, he has almost half a million HP, and casts Regen on himself halfway through that HP. If you don't know the trick to nullify Regen, you can end up not being able to outdamage the regeneration. In The Void Beyond, you have to fight him with only Serah and your monster ally, meaning all it takes is one slip-up to end the fight. In A Dying World, you fight him with only Noel, which complicates things further. And in all of them, once he goes down, he gets back up and you have to fight him again.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • Vishap, the boss of The Steps of Faith Trial that acts as the Final Boss of ARR, isn't hard like other Trials, but it seen more as a frustrating and tedious fight because of the unusual method of fighting him. Basically he's a Advancing Boss of Doom that you have to beat by using cannons and harpoons to take chunks of his HP down as he slowly marches towards the gates of Ishgard. The issue is that it's a fight that doesn't convey these mechanics well, adds appear constantly to distract players, and because of how the boss is designed, players deal Scratch Damage to him. Plus because the boss is moving, casters are often forced to run slightly ahead of the group to attack and not worry about range. It's considered a frustrating fight just because of all these. Tellingly, the fight was redone during Endwalker to become a solo-instanced fight, so players no longer have to worry about getting the fight in their Trial roulette.
  • The Dragon's Neck from ARR isn't hard at all from an overall difficulty angle. Both bosses, Ultros and Typhon, don't have strong attacks, and both go down relatively easily. What makes it one of the most annoying Trials though are the mechanics both have: Ultros will randomly turn people into Imps, leaving them with a weak attack that does little to contribute to the ongoing fight, while Typhon can blow you off the ring, forcing you to be stunned for a few seconds while you wait to jump back in. Both of these turn a simple fight into one people despise, especially because there isn't really a way to counter their attacks; Ultros will just turn people into Imps without a way to undo it (and the debuff is almost a minute long), and Typhon will blow you off the stage sometimes without a player being able to avoid it, especially when he starts spinning around the room blowing air. ^note This is all one big mechanic; the imps, who are ALWAYS the DPS, are supposed to get hit by Ultro's aqua breath, then punch Typhon when he charges the sneeze to weaken it. Not that the game does even a passable job of explaining it....
  • Rathalos from the Monster Hunter: World collab functions like a boss fight in its home game. In other words, it's an absolute damage sponge of a boss and has no cast bars to signal its attacks, forcing players to watch it carefully to understand what's coming. It's also impossible to hold aggro on it, allowing Rathalos to attack randomly and stun you repeatedly with its attacks with no chance to get back up and dodge if you get hit even once. Its HP drops much more quickly after you manage to stagger it, but it's a pain in the ass to fight if you don't know what you're getting into.

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