Boss In Mook Clothing - Television Tropes & Idioms

These guys? Yeah. They're dead.

You're walking along on your quest to save the world, when you run into a Random Encounter with a 50-foot-tall, three-headed, skeletal, radioactive fire-breathing demonic dragon. Okay, you're 12 levels higher than the average enemy here, so it must be only a Level Five Onix.

But what's this? It's still standing. Worse, it just took out four-fifths of your Magic Knight's Hit Points with one swipe of its claw, and that guy has armor with a permanent barrier spell.

So you don't hold back the next turn. Your fighter scores a Critical Hit, your archer shoots from afar, your sorcerers use their twin flare spell, and your cleric heals the whole party.

But... that enemy is still standing after this, and it just wiped out half of your party with its radioactive fire breath. This is supposed to be a regular enemy, but it might as well be a Boss In Mook Clothing.

In other words, any regular enemy that would make you think it's a boss, but isn't. This isn't an actual boss that shows up as a regular enemy later. This is just a regular enemy. Yet it's still as tough as a boss, or at least tougher than the enemies in that area.

In order to determine if a regular enemy qualifies, it must have at least two of the following traits. It can be any of these traits, but it must have two or more.

It has a lot more HP than a regular enemy.
- Can also have extremely high defense or evasion (similar to a Metal Slime, and may even cross over with one) if such stats exist.
It does a lot more damage than a regular enemy (moot if the protagonist is a One Hit Point Wonder) and is quite capable of Total Party Kills.
- Can also have attacks that are difficult to avoid (moot if it's a game where dodging is based on chance, like a turn-based RPG)
Requires a lot more strategy to defeat than a regular enemy. (The Useless Useful Spell is almost certainly useless here, unless Revive Kills Zombie.)
Has at least one of the following points, but one of the above must still be included to count.
- Has a lot of varied attacks compared to regular enemies.
- Has the ability to inflict many Standard Status Effects on you, sometimes multiple effects at once.
- Has an entrance like a boss or mid-boss, but is not in a designated Boss Room (or has no Life Meter appear).
- Does not respawn the first few times you meet it (assuming the game has respawns), but is still not in a designated boss area.
- Gives you either a lot of rewards for your effort or barely any at all.
- Appears by itself, or with a few small enemies that can be wiped out easily.

Once in a while, The Ogre is like this.

Sometimes, this is confused with or overlaps with Bonus Boss. Contrast with Mook Promotion, which is not a boss as a mook, but is clearly a boss when it's a boss. Subtrope of Demonic Spiders.

Examples:

One of the earliest and most notorious offenders is the enemy in the picture, WarMech (later translated as "Death Machine") from the first Final Fantasy game. He has as many hit points as the penultimate boss, and his attacks range from powerful regular attacks to literally nuking the party on the spot.
- The Updated Rerelease version was actually made worse - they doubled its hitpoints and it regenerates 100 hit points per round (due to its high defenses, even knocking off 100 hit points per round is something you won't do until much later than your first potential encounter with it). Some people find it more difficult than the Final Boss (well, this was true in the original, but even more feel that way now).
- The Earthgift Shrine bonus dungeon has Abyss Worms. Higher Attack than the four bosses (and the four Fiends!), no magic weakness, and such a high M Def as to make your Mages practically useless. Good luck.
- The Brachioraidos is a recurring one in the series. Its looks and translated name have changed drastically with each installment, making it hard to notice. Its appearances in order have been
  - FF6 as the Brachosaur. Based on the brachiosaurus.
  - FF7 as the Vlakorados. Square stops caring what the monster is shaped like.
  - FFX as the Th'uban. This one breaks the tradition by being a bonus boss.
  - FF4 Advance as the Brachioraidos. Not a random encounter but a roaming sprite.
- Later Final Fantasy games usually have Behemoth in this role. Final Fantasy IX had a giant dragon monster in a certain place that exists for the specific purpose of screwing you over if you don't heed the Moogle's warning. Adequate preparation (stock up on phoenix downs, equip everyone with Antibody and Auto-Reflect) can render these grand dragons quite beatable, and thus turn this early accessible area into a convenient high-speed level-up treadmill. (Doubly so if you realize the Grand Dragons are a multiple of level 5, and it's quite possible to have Lvl5 Death by then.)
- The Jackanapes from Final Fantasy V is an example of one of these. The first time you can encounter it, its attacks will do several hundred more points of damage then you can take(even at higher levels, it will still eat your HP quickly), and it's fast enough that you're almost certain to lose one or two party members before you can run away.
  - Oh, and it can also dodge almost ALL of your attacks and magic, so ~~when~~ if you are unlucky enough to meet one, you won't be able to fight it out.
- Yans. Cute little lambs that proceed to Comet and Meteor you to death. Thankfully, they're only found in one optional area.
  - Not to mention that they could blow away characters or inflict Virus on them, which prevents those characters from getting experience. Taking a turn to cure Virus often resulted in at least one character getting either Snorted, Cometed or Meteored. Fun times.
- The Brachosaur from Final Fantasy VI. It has in the neighborhood of 60,000 hitpoints, a special attack that does around 8000 damage, and can cast Ultima, which hits for around 7000 damage on each party character. To put that in perspective, that's about twice the hitpoints you'll have when you're at average game-beating levels. Brachosaur drops the Economizer, however, so it's well worth the risk.
  - Also in Final Fantasy VI, the Slagworm (a.k.a. the Hoover on the SNES version) could very easily fall into this category for people who don't read a guide. Its attacks include Crush, which kills one party member instantly, and Sandstorm, which deals a massive amount of damage to your whole party, and it counters most attacks with this. Sometimes it even counters with two Sandstorms. It also has HP on par with most of the bosses you've faced up to that point. So how does reading a guide make this any easier? Well, there's a very easy though non-intuitive way of beating it. Just cast Death on it. Surprisingly, it actually works here.
  - There's others. A Tyrannosaur has around 20K hitpoints and can cast Meteor. Mantodea's other stats aren't anything special, but its regular old attack can wipe out most characters in a single hit.
  - There's also the Fiend Dragon, found in the final dungeon. It's rare, but if you run into it, you have to deal with a monster that not only packs high HP and powerful magic, but also is the only monster in the game to have Heartless Angel, which reduces everyone's HP to 1. It then likes to follow up with South Cross, which also hits everybody, and will probably wipe out the whole party. Isn't that fun?
- Final Fantasy VII has Vlakorados, which is a semi-example - while its attacks aren't particularly powerful and it's susceptible to most status effects that bosses are immune to, it has an absurdly high amount of HP (33,333 - in contrast, the second-to-last boss you fight in the game has 40,000) that it can easily take a half hour of more for an appropriately-leveled character to beat it to death.
  - The Unknowns in the Gelnika probably qualify too, as do the Ghost Ships in the Junon Reactor (which know an attack which removes a member of your party from the battle, and have to be morphed into items to stand a chance against one of the Bonus Bosses without using any exploits).
  - Also, the Midgar Zolom was probobly the toughest creature on the first continent; yet when you finally had the requisite power to defeat it, you really didn't get anything.
  - You could learn the Beta Enemy Skill off of it, which is incredibly useful for most of the game. You don't actually have to kill it to do that though.
- Final Fantasy XII had a whole slew of these called Rare Monsters. They showed up among the normal fights on the world map, but were boss-tough. Generally, though, they only came after you if you attacked them first.
  - There's also Wild Saurian (which shows up in the first open area of the game), the Werewolf (second area this time), Dive Talon (shows up early, but you can get a Disc One Nuke from it), and the Entites.
  - The Elementals can count since they're usually of a much higher level then the players in areas they are found in, and will aggressively attack the player if they so much as whiffed even a scent of magic in their area. Even White Magic will cause them to go Aggro. They also are immune to all elements, except their own, which they of course absorb. They also take around 1/2 damage from physical attacks.
- Final Fantasy VIII has T-Rexaur. The game even tells you that "It's better to run if you encounter one".
  - They're pushovers if you junction Sleep to a weapon, though. Quistis tells you this when you first go to the Training Centre.
  - This troper prefers to have a stock of Blind spells as it doesn't wear off.
- One Word: Tonberries. Loads of HP, and one lethal attack.
  - The first time this Troper encountered one, he kept thinking why wouldn't it die. Not to mention how it ominously creeps towards the party. However there is a trick to beating them. Usually their only attack (unless they have something else up their sleeve), Everyone's Grudge, is based on the amount of enemies that the victim defeated. If you're finding yourself in a place chock full of Tonberries, just switch to a party that hasn't been used.
  - Oddly enough, the Tonberries in Final Fantasy VI (which were called Pugs in the original US translation) were much easier. You still had to have a fairly high level to beat them, but you were already close by the time you got to that part of the game anyway. However, they also punish you for level grinding, in that their main spell (which Strago can learn) is Step Mine. It does damage based on how many steps you've taken.
- Uragnites in Final Fantasy XI hide in their shell the second you hit them, which has them acquire massive damage reduction and a powerful Healing Factor effect, and any further physical hits while in the shell will be countered with a deadly area poison effect. It's normally best to build TP and use a Weaponskill when the thing pops out again, while mages can just whack the shell once, then run away and nuke safely while it's in the shell, immobile. Even being level 75, one of these mobs at 30-ish take awhile to kill.
- Malboros have a lot of HP, and can inflict so many status ailments with one move that an unprepared party can wind up killing each other instead, if they aren't outright defeated by something like Petrify or an Instant Death countdown.
  - Don't forget Great Malboros in Final Fantasy X, particularly in the Omega Ruins. All encounters with Great Malboros in the Omega Ruins will be "Ambushed!" encounters; if you don't have First Strike in any of your characters' equipment, prepare to face anything from a mere normal attack to the dreaded Bad Breath, which will most likely inflict Confusion on your party members, causing them to kill each other and themselves.
  - Heck, Final Fantasy X has a lot of these enemies. In the final dungeon, about half of the enemies have either powerful party-hitting attacks, a lot of status immunities, the ability to inflict tons of bad status effects, or some combination of the above. And they all have over 40,000 HP.
- The Bonus Bosses from Final Fantasy VII may count, as they have the battle music of regular enemies...
- In some cases, Cactuars can be a pain. They typically have the maximum evasion rate and throw 1000 needles at your party. Then they have the nerve to run away. But if you defeat one, you're usually well rewarded.
- Final Fantasy III has the Yellow Dragons. Harder than most bosses, but they can drop Onion equipment.
  - There are also green and red dragons. both are stronger. The only thing stronger than red dragons is the final boss, and the Bonus boss added into the DS version.
- Final Fantasy IV for the DS in general has a lot of these, adding to the already Nintendo Hard nature of the game.
  - You may encounter a variety of dragons after you recruit Edge that possess a lot of HP and may have a nasty attack. One of the worst is the Thunder Dragon, which is slightly faster than your characters and uses a powerful attack. Good luck trying to revive your tank.
  - There will be instances where an enemy will have a party-hitting spell (whether it'd be a normal spell or a special attack). At first these aren't too dangerous, but then it gets ridiculous to the point where two of these can kill a party that's overleveled. Oh, and they love to come in groups.
  - Trap Doors in the Sealed Cave. They cast instant death spells that are 100% guaranteed. But they have a weakness: reflect their death spell back at them!
  - Everything in the final dungeon. The last two floors are also applicable to the original version.
- If you're a ways into the game and you find a one-eyed floating bat thing, run. While their names are never really consistent (Ahriman, Doom-Eye, Blood Eye, etc), they have one thing in common, they have instant death attacks. Thanks to the computer being a cheating bastard, the useless useful spell rule usually doesn't apply. This includes straight up instant death, a form of Russian roulette (never lands on the caster for some reason), and some form of death countdown attack.
- the hill, fire, ice and thunder gigases in final fantasy II
The Guardian from Symphony of the Night. They protect the room to Dracula (poorly, since there is the way below), but they are still really tough to beat (barring Game Breaker methods).
Victory Armor from Harmony of Dissonance. It's a pushover when you meet it just before Death, but until then, watch out.
Dr Salvador, Garrador, Bellas Sisters, JJ, Regenerator, and Iron Maiden from Resident Evil 4.
Ishtar from the Final Chapter of Live A Live can be described as a random encounter miniboss.
- Live A Live also has one in the Prehistoric Chapter and one in the Bakematsu Chapter. They warn you by using the boss music when you encounter them, though- and there's a rather small chance that you'd run into them without knowing.
Dink Smallwood had several kinds of larger monsters as bosses, all of which would appear as random encounters soon thereafter.
Abyss Bat in Sa Ga Frontier; granted that you have to wait around for him to show up, but he puts up quite a fight.
FEAR has the tough REV mechas which appear occasionally, they fire barrages of missiles, have twin miniguns and can take several shots from the rocket launcher and/or particle beam weapons. And more frequently, there's the Heavy Armor soldiers, a form of Elite Mook which has ultra-heavy Powered Armor and usually carries either a Penetrator rifle (which damages you clean through your armor) a particle cannon, or a rocket launcher. Later expansions feature ones with miniguns and riot shields. Project Origin throws Heavies with laser rifles at you, too, who can kill you in a couple of seconds if you're out in the open.
Hunters in the Halo series. Also to some extent the Gold Elites in the first game(which slice and dice your Red Shirt Army) and the Silver Ultra ones in the second. Especially in the Mausoleum, aka "Breaking Benjamin Room" Multi Mook Melee.
- In the first Halo once one knows how to deal with them the hunters become ridiculously easy, especially evident on the hardest difficulty, where even the lowliest elite is a dangerous threat. Simply get close to the hunter, wait for it to try to melee, dodge and circle around to its back and put a single pistol or shotgun round into the exposed flesh For Massive Damage. Brought them down in a single stroke. They fixed this in the next game, where Hunters have an attack designed specifically to crush players standing directly behind them.
- Worst example: Brute Chieftains in the third game. They can take a ton of punishment, wield BFGs such as Fuel Rod Cannons, are immune to plasma grenade sticking (they just bounce off), and can turn temporarily invincible. Just about every other enemy (and many vehicles) can be taken out with a single well placed sticky, but not these guys.
The Red Demon/Red Arremer from the Ghosts 'n Goblins series. Its dive attack is hard to dodge, and because of its HP, you have to dodge it a lot.
The Wild ARMs series has many of these, which are usually farmed for experience points or rare items. The most infamous are the Hayonkonton/Hyulkonton/Creeping Chaos, but there are others like the the Apeman Vargon and Jumbo Bearcat.
- Don't forget the Leprechaun. Only encountered it once, though. I think it was in the mines at Holst. Was absurdly weak to electricity, though. A few Hi-Sparks took it out quickly.
The Amazee Dayzee in Paper Mario might just look like a sparkling Crazee Dayzee, but it has an attack power of 20 and a good amount of HP and could murder an unsuspecting player... If only it didn't flee so frequently.
The enemies in the Container Yard of Breath of Fire 3 are actually tougher than the final boss.
- Similarly, the Rider enemy in Breath of Fire 4 is much stronger than the final boss, using the game's strongest spells on the party, and healing itself an absurd amount every turn. To add insult to injury, sometimes, when you are reviving party members frantically and in frustration of not being able to damage him faster than he regenerates, he actually heals you and allows you to escape.
- Breath of Fire 2 already contributed the K. Sludge and the N. Rider to this trope. The former came in groups of three and packed a very effective Instant Death spell, and the latter can use all of the highest level spells in the game.
The Alto Angelo armors in Devil May Cry 4. Tough, fast and hard-hitting, almost always in packs with their Bianco Angelo lesser versions. Fortunately, there is an exploit to clean house fast, and paying Homage to Zangief with the Devil Triggered Buster against them is always a satisfying payoff.
- And the Shadow monsters in the original Devil May Cry. While not quite as difficult as the actual bosses (most of which are That One Boss), they qualify in every other respect and would be difficult bosses in most games.
- Devil May Cry 4 also has the Blitz enemies. Spends most of it's time encased in a lightning shield which hurts Dante/Nero should they melee attack them whilst it's up, leaving you to spam the weak ranged moves to get rid of the shield. They also love to teleport around the arena in a ball of lightning, are invincible whilst doing so, and will appear and strike without warning, sometimes right in front of you. Thankfully in story you only have to deal with one at a time, but in the Bloody Palace survival mode, you have to deal with 2 at once. The only thing that makes these guys even slightly easier is that because they're blind they sometimes attack anything that fights in the room. This Troper has never seen them do that to even a Scarecrow more than once per fight. Then if you take them down to a certain evel of health, but don't do enough damage to finish them them during their shield down phase, it Turns Red and in addition to normal attacking at even greater speeds, will find great joy in trying to spear you with their horns, and blow up with you impaled on them (thankfully, like all DMC grabs, this can be broken by entering DT mode).
Diablo and Diablo 2 have Unique and Legendary monsters. They look like the other critters of their kind, but with a palette swap and often some aura or other visable powerup others do not have. They have way more HP, more striking power, and gain 1-4 enhancements, such as Cold Enchanted, which allows them to chill you when they hit and can grant Cold Immunity on higher difficulties, Extra Fast, Teleportation, and so on. Depending on how much the RNG hates you, you could enter Hell difficulty and run straight into something like a Cursed, Extra Strong, Holy Freeze Aura Enchanted, Stone Skin zombie, which is not fun for melee-types. They are almost always accompanied by "minions" who are less pumped up but still stronger then average mooks of the same type. These creatures have proper names that always follow this formula: *proper noun* the *adjective* eg: "Rendflesh the Unholy", "Soulblight the Unclean"
- Diablo 2 also has Champions, which sacrifice the enhancements for the fact that every single monster in a group with a Champion will also be a Champion. The expansion allows Champions to be Possessed, Fanatic, Ghostly, or Berserkers as well.
  - Diablo 2 had those two as intended features— But there was one enemy no one ever intended. One of the random properties for the Legendary and Unique enemies mentioned above is Lightning Enchanted— The monster hits with electricity, and if hit, sprays a wave of tiny, lag-inducing, homing sparks. Another property is Multi-Shot, which let archers and casters shoot several bolts. If an enemy ever showed up as Multi-Shot, Lightning Enchanted (MSLE), then the aforementioned homing sparks TRIPLED IN NUMBER. More then one player has instantly, accidentally died because a mis-fire off-screen hit one of these. And "Chunky Salsa Rule" does not even begin to describe what happens if a Barbarian Whirlwinds into one...
  - Hey, you forgot when this happens to the scarabs, monsters that all already have the Lightning Enchanted quality. YEAARGHGHBLBLBLBLE
  - This troper once had the misfourtune of accidently Zeal attacking a group of Champion Scarabs with the usual lightning. Not cool. Not one bit.
  - Almost as bad for Barbarians is the Immune to Physical property. They have only two ways to kill such a unique: weapons with elemental damage or a couple of level 30 skills. Sometimes an immune unique will show up before you have either.
  - The game absolutely loves to ruin this troper's day with cold-enchanted archers who have a very annoying habit of showing up in Act 1 to massacre her low-level characters.
  - The absolute worst thing, though? In hell difficulty, it's very, very unlikely, but still possible: An enemy that has both physical and magic immunity, in addition to the usual likely elemental enchantments. They're still killable, but are absolute nightmares for anyone who hasn't been runeword-abusing like it's going out of style.
Suikoden occasionally likes to toss high-level monsters onto the overworld map just to mix things up. This is usually accompanied by a change in battle music.
World Of Warcraft has its own classification for such monsters: elite. While those monsters mostly show up in dungeons geared for a group of player capable to deal with them, but some of them are found in the open world and can quickly kill unsuspecting players. The three most infamous examples:
- Devilsaurs, T-Rex-like enemies that patrol an entire zone. Unlike other giant enemies, their movement isn't easy to hear, earning them a reputation of being sneaky.
- Sons of Arugal, scoring bonus points for looking a lot like regular enemies in the same area, but being as tough as their brothers found in a nearby dungeon. Fortunately, their numbers were cut back somewhat in a patch.
- Fel Reavers, being seventy-feet tall mechanical constructs that blot out the horizon, sound like a freight train piling into a factory of tubas, and shake the landscape for yards around with every step. They seem about as stealthy as a sumo wrestler wearing full plate mail trying to tiptoe through a room of sleeping cats, but just you try and sit down and rest for a moment in the Hellfire Peninsula without experiencing that dread moment of looking behind you only to see an eclipse of black metal and green fire just close enough to ruin your day. As an aside, for a brief period during the beta, the Fel Reavers' models accidentally switched to that of a regular bear; with predictable results. More than a few lives were lost to the dreaded Bear Reavers.
  - That wasn't accidental. Unrelatedly; a GM once told this troper, how a hundred foot tall steam powered mech could sneak up on someone. The GM said that there had been a contest at the end of the closed beta, and the fel reavers won. The prize? A trip to Un'goro Crater, where they learned stealth from the above-mentioned flannelfooted Devilsaurs.
  - Another classification of monster is "rare", which only spawn once every several hours, can (usually with the higher levelled ones) take a concentrated group effort to down, and act as mobile loot pinatas. Rares are distinguished by the smaller silver dragon around their portrait. Finally, you can combine both types into the "elite rare" class, which has a big silver dragon around its portrait and usually a necklace of player skulls around its neck...
- The Storm Giants that patrol Howling Fjord may also count. Thankfully, they have very loud footsteps, so you can at least hear them coming from a long way off.
- This troper when playing a level 80 horde Warlock used to hide himself in the Darnassus forests and leave out an imp put on Stay. Since the imp looks just like the regular level 7 imp mobs that spawn over there, it usually doesn't take too long until a lowbie attacks it, and then quickly gets oneshotted by the level 80 imp pet.
- Near the Black Temple there's a group of demon hunter trainees, who have a very similar looking instructor with them. This troper flew down to fight them all at once, being a protection paladin, and didn't see him before being swarmed by a dozen trainees. Actually won, but the instructor about twice as long to die as all his students put together.
Dungeon Siege has this to some degree: occasionally you'll see enemies lit by a Pillar Of Light, with the same attack power but usually 3 times more HP than your average foe.
Etrian Odyssey, being a Nintendo Hard dungeon crawler, has a ton of these monsters, designated as "FOEs" (shorthand for Fucking Overpowered Enemies) in game terms. First appearing on the second level, they appear as arrows on your map, and most of them look exactly like the normal enemies in the dungeon...but have vastly higher HP and attack power. Some follow set movement patterns, while others will rush your party when you get in their line of sight. Others, once they sense blood (such as the Wolves and Skolls) will actually join other FOEs mid-fight to make your life even more of a living hell.
- Even on TVtropes, F.O.E!
- The sequel, 'Heroes of Lagaard', in addition to haveing a F.O.E on the first floor, takes this one step further. A specific random encounter has 10,000 hit points, more than five times the number of hit points of the next strongest random encounter, and 3000 more than the strongest FOE the game has to offer. Said random encounter also has a multihit attack on your entire party what will usually OHKO any of the non-tank classes, as well as a skill that prevents you from using any of YOUR skills. Said random encounter also holds the dubious distinction of being the only FOE or random encounter in the game that is immune to Instadeath Skills (most Bosses are immune), and the ONLY enemy in the ENTIRE game that is immune to Stun. 'Boss in Mook Clothing', indeed.
Wanna get your ass kicked in the Bonus Dungeon of Valkyrie Profile? Right before the final Bonus Boss, there's usually a normal battle Palette Swap of an normal end game boss. Tough, but doable. However, there is a small chance that you will fight hamsters instead. Normal looking, regular sized hamsters. Prepare to die.
The obscure Platformer Scaler has Dragon War Beasts, enormous monsters with several attacks, they're only vulnerable after performing a certain attack, and gobs of health. They're usually only found at the end of Multi Mook Melees. However, there's also an extra-fast, camoflauging monster with high defense and HP that shows up all over the place—it's very annoying.
In God Hand, sometimes, when you kill an enemy, a demon jumps out. Now normally these are no rougher than the standard Giant Mook, although they can really suck if you're low on health. But after Level Four, there is a chance that when you kill an enemy, one of the Four-Armed Demons will emerge. The first one you met in the game got its own cutscene. They have a beam attack, deal great damage, and carry a massive trident. If at all possible, run for your freaking life.
The elephants in The World Ends With You. They spam an annoying attack—a stomp creating a slowly widening shockwave—that can interrupt any attack. Easy enough for Neku to dodge, but you might have to actually start paying attention to the top screen so your partner doesn't end up making you die. Even if you're using the partner that can float in mid-air! The damn stomp knocks him out of the air!
Too many enemies to name in the Shin Megami Tensei series — fortunately, most of them have a Revive Kills Zombie way to defeat them, in an aversion of Useless Useful Spell.
- A really egregious example would be the rainbow-colored (the exact name escapes me at the moment) Maya in The Answer (Persona 3). It has high resistance to damn near everything except Almighty attacks plus can nuke pretty much any party member with Black Viper (single target Almighty spell). Woe unto you if it hits Aigis.
Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge, from a series known for random encounters sometimes being tougher than bosses, has a very, very low chance of the party encountering a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the final outdoor area of the game. It's unlikely you'll see one in six or seven games, but if you are that unlucky, it is game over. This troper has never heard of anyone successfully taking down a Tyrannosaur.
The Gatling Groink from Pikmin 2. It uses a powerful bombing attack with a wide blast radius, capable of killing many of your Pikmin in a single hit. It can fire a long way and usually has a wide "territory," meaning it's capable of reaching your Pikmin almost anywhere. Your captains can't really kill it on their own, and it has a sheild that prevents it from being attacked from the front at all. To make matters worse, its health actually begins to regenerate once you "kill" it—so it'll just come back unless you have your Pikmin quickly take it back to your ship, which does it in for good.
- The Adult Bulbear from the same game deserves mentioning as well. Unlike most enemies, the Bulbear will actively pursue your Pikmin once it runs into them. It will not stop until it is killed, and it can take quite a beating. Finally, it does the same health regeneration thing as the Gatling Groink, so you have to take it to the ship quickly, or you have to do the whole thing over again. Also, it's likely that you'll have to deal with Dwarf Bulbears along with the Adult, which will only increase Pikmin casualties. And in order to get 100% completion you have to, at one point, defeat (I think) 3 of them without any Pikmin dying.
- The enemy placement in the underground levels is random every time you visit it, so the best way to defeat them is to just keep restarting until they spawn in a place that gives you a better strategic advantage.
Mother 3 - One word: Cattlesnake. It has more than twice as much HP as any other enemy in the area, and has a ridiculously high defense - characters that do 50 damage to other enemies will only do 10 damage to the cattlesnake. It also has an attack that can hit the whole party for 70-80 HP damage per strike - at a time when your characters will average about 140 HP.
- Being fair, before you first see one there is a sign warning you to keep your distance, and by the time you have to pass through that area for the second time, you're strong enough to defeat them.
- Speaking of Mother, the whole last area is Boss in Mook Clothing thanks to a lack of quality assurance. Unless you have a certain character, the whole place is impossible.
- Ghost of Starman in Earth Bound can count. It immediately starts with PSI Starstorm Alpha, which is guaranteed to kill Paula and severely injure the rest of your team. Then it counts down for a few turns and then follows up with PSI Starstorm Omega. Oh, and it usually has a few other mooks to clean up. This Troper fears Ghost of Starman more than Final Starman (which uses PSI Starstorm Omega after a few turns) or Bionic Kraken.
- Also of note is the Scalding Coffee Cup, which shows up in Fourside. They only have one attack, but it WILL knock out at least one of your party members. Couple that with the fact that, at that time, you only have Ness and Jeff in your party, you'll be running back and forth from the hospital a LOT.
The Baldurs Gate series occasionally has monsters like this. For example, have you ever fought a Giant Spider at 2nd level? Because that poison will mess you up. Try skeleton warriors, who look no different from the skeletons you've wrecked in mass numbers throughout the game, but have hit points like crazy and are some of the few Mooks to carry magic weapons and do damage like a small Mack truck! How about monsters like illithid, who are more dangerous to the party's Mighty Glacier than the Squishy Wizard because their primary method of attack goes after the mind and ignores hit points? And unless you have one of two unique items in Baldurs Gate II, Beholders will destroy the party by blinking at you.
In Bioshock, certain machinegun-wielding enemies in Apollo Square have as much or MORE health as the game's major bosses, but are otherwise completely undistinguishable from the regular machinegun-wielding enemies who have much less health.
The Big Eyes from the original Mega Man. Sure, the game's Nintendo Hard, but these things are three times as tall and wide as Mega Man, take an immense number of hits to kill (20 buster shots), are immune to many of the boss weapons, and take off a third of Mega Man's health bar with one collision. Not to mention that they hop at Mega Man with impressive speed. The only way to get away from them is to run under them when they do an extra-big hop, which happens at random. It gets a bit easier when you get Ice Man's weapon, which freezes them in place for a few seconds, allowing you to either escape, or to switch to the P-Shooter and unload. Almost every Mega Man game since then had their own Boss in Mook Clothing, but none are as notorious as the Big Eyes.
- Ironically, the Warm Up Boss added to the remake Mega Man Powered Up is the Proto Eye, a bigger yet laughably easier version of the Big Eyes.
The originally-named "Obsidian Enforcers" in Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction. A few of them show up in the last few levels, and although their attacks aren't any harder to dodge than the normal enemies of their type, they have approximately 1.65 metric boatloads of Hit Points. It's entirely possible to empty the entire ammunition supply of a level 1 RYNO IV into one on Challenge Mode and have it survive. They don't get a health bar like the other type of miniboss, either, which brings up the truly horrifying thought that maybe they were just intended to be regular enemies.
All over the place in Maple Story, as well as Fluffy The Terrible, as most enemies look either harmless, cute, or similar to another enemy. There are often also one or two much more deadly enemies in areas filled with more level friendly enemies. This would be a lot less egregious if there was a way to tell how strong an enemy is in-game other then letting it hit you.
Of the many, many unique monsters in the Roguelike game Angband, only Sauron and Morgoth are mandatory Boss Battles, and even they don't appear in specific Boss Rooms on the levels they guard.
The Nintendo Hard RPG The 7th Saga has a variant: every random encounter is like this. The bosses themselves are often significantly less likely to kill you than the random encounters in the dungeon that contains the boss.
The Sootie family in Star Ocean 3: Till the End of Time's Bonus Dungeon Sphere 211. A single one can easily kill a level 255 party (which is downright absurd, considering the fact that the game's uber-Bonus Boss Freya can't even damage characters that the normal enemy Sootie Sister could kill in one or two blows), and they are a pain in the ass to even hit. Demonic Spiders much?
The Might And Magic series had this whenever you face a spellcaster. If it could cast certain spells, you were simply doomed. Namely, Meteor Shower (with which you could often kill your OWN PARTY with) and Shrapnel are two of the most deadly, and sometimes Death Blossom could also put you in a world of hurt.
- Don't forget Finger of Death which was a one hit kill, or Eradicate which literally destroyed one of your parties bodies so that they could not be brought back to life with the Raise Dead skill. You needed an even more powerful Resurrection spell to heal them.
- Or Dragon Breath from MM7.
In Digimon World Dawn/Dusk, Once you beat what is essentially a massive final Boss Rush, you unnannouncedly unlock a trio of these, all in different areas. If you accidentally stumble upon one of these unprepared, even the weakest one can easily shred your ass with powerful attacks; especially if you wind up fighting multiples of the same Boss in Mook Clothing at the same time, which CAN happen. On the plus side, though, beating them nets a hefty sum of EXP.
Wyverns in The Witcher also qualify to this, as they're very tough and when you encounter them, even on the Easy level, they're hard to kill. Especially as they always come in packs of about 8.
- Let's not forget that they can drop right out of the sky, so when you think you're approaching one or two manageable enemies, you can suddenly find yourself surrounded, poisoned, knocked down and/or pained.
In the final dungeon of Phantasy Star IV, you may run into a Prophallus, uber-monsters that bear a striking resemblance to the final boss of the original game.
- Phantasy Star II had Blasters in the Bio Lab and Nido Tower areas. If you met one, your best bet was to either run or nuke it with every single bit of firepower you had. Meet two? Pray you can run, OR ELSE.
- In Phantasy Star IV, the first Sand Worm you fight (usually) is a boss. However, when you get your first vehicle and cross the sand pits, you'll encounter them as regular mooks. However, Sand Worms are ridiculously powerful. This Troper always ran away from one.
  - The real kicker with that first sandworm is that it's an extremely difficult boss fight when you first get to where you can take the mission for it, often capable of killing or at least severely wounding a party member per round, before you have access to resurrection items— and that one doesn't have all the regular Sand Worm attacks. It can't use Earthquake, which will destroy an un-buffed party even twenty levels later.
  - No, the real kicker is that one of the types of little worms you fight in Motavia, if you leave a single one of them alive, will run off and summon Another full-powered Sandworm.
Chainsaw users in Scarface: The World Is Yours. Bazooka and grenade launcher users, while also capable of One Hit Kills, at least went down in one shot from the Desert Eagle or sniper rifle, usually with dismemberment. Chainsaw guys? Multiple shots, making them fairly Implacable in the otherwise fairly realistic title.
It's a good thing Avernum 5 only does a mild version of this, because it gets used constantly.
The Shamblers in Quake 1. Nightmare Fuel-errific Yeti-type monster with a ton of HP, resistance to stunning and explosive damage, and a lethal line-of-sight lightning attack, similar to the Archvile's flame attack in Doom II. The spideresque Vores too, which appear as a sort of Mini Boss at the end of the second episode. Their homing exploding spiked ball attack is nigh-impossible to dodge.
- In my opinion, the Shamblers wrecked Quake 1. Since only the Lightning Gun or the Perferator kills them before they can splatter you over the walls, it became a game of trying to conserve nails and batteries while killing every other damn monster with the SUPER DANGEROUS TO THE PLAYER rocket launcher.
Fable 2 sort of liked this one. The 'boss' fights were really just souped up mooks. That, or commonly encountered enemies later on.
Examples from the Metroid series:
- The Black Space Pirates in Zero Mission. You can usually just run past them, but there are two you must defeat in the final escape sequence. Trouble is, they're much, much harder than regular pirates. Bad enough under normal conditions; tragic if you barely scraped past the final boss, which is likely in a low-percent or 100% run. These two bastards caused more retries and general frustration than anything else in the game until a good AI exploit was found.
- In several games, Ridley has a pair of souped-up pirates as his guards. They're no real threat in Fusion, but in Super Metroid, they'll trash you easily if you don't know what you're doing. It doesn't help that Ridley is That One Boss.
- And let's not forget the metroids themselves. They don't look like much, but they're a lot more agile than most enemies, are resistant to many attacks, and do a lot of damage fast once they latch onto you.
Warhammer Online loves this trope. Fighting a bunch of nameless mooks? Well odds are there will be one in that pack wandering around somewhere who is a champion which means many more HP and hits a lot harder. They also tend to be physically identical to the nameless mooks.
Darknuts and Iron Knuckles in The Legend Of Zelda games are frequently like this, when they aren't used as bosses or mini bosses themselves. Both Twilight Princess and Wind Waker feature Multi Mook Melees that end in fights against three Darknuts, and they're arguably more difficult than the final bosses. (However, in Twilight Princess, if you have the Magic Armor that eats money, you're pretty well set.)
- Or Wind Waker's Magic Armor that eats magic, and a few blue or green potions...
The Alpha Sections in Beyond Good And Evil; not to mention that they're everywhere. While they do have a multitude of weaknesses and tricks that can be used to take them out easily, taking them head-on is almost guranteed to end in your ownage. They have mines, lasers, and hammers that deal tons of damage, and they have shields that make them extemely hard to hit. Luckily, you can sneak past them most of the time.
The Game Boy RPG Robopon has—erm, well, quite a lot of them. Perhaps the worst offenders, though, are Move-type Robopon. They use attacks that increase their speed to insane levels, making it almost impossible to land hits on them. To make matters worse, they generally have either high Attack or Defense, meaning they'll either pulverize your team into the ground in seconds or take what hits you do land on them and shrug it off like it's nothing. To make matters more insulting, when you use Move-types, they often end up gimped because The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard and has access to better moves and equipment than you do.
Some of the enemy monsters in Monster Rancher have a tendency to be much more powerful than other monsters, even of their rank—and it's not just the ones intended to be stronger, like those used for invitation matches. Enemy Gaboos in Monster Rancher 2 tend to have ridiculously powerful moves, as to Golems—in any game.
Dark Titans from Sonic Unleashed. These massive beasts are extremely strong, send out almost difficult-to-dodge shockwaves, have massive HP bars, and all their attacks not only send Sonic the Werehog flying, but actually keep him stunned on the ground for several seconds just waiting to juggle him to death at lower levels. It doesn't help that they almost never appear alone.
- It does help that they're too stupid to realize that their attacks hurt the other enemies as well as you, though.
Fallout 3: Deathclaws are exceedingly ferocious and can demolish even high-level players if they are caught unawares. Super Mutant Behemoths are considered the "bosses" of the game, as there is an achievement for killing them all, but players have proven that a Deathclaw can kill one in 1v1 combat.
- Maybe it is just the way I play my character, but this Troper finds Deathclaws to be pushovers. They are fairly easy to spot before they have spotted you, and can usually be brought down before they can close distance (in one case, I killed one that was down the length of a house wall, maybe 15 feet away, without taking damage). The Yao Guai, on the other hand, is a beast! In combat with a number of Super Mutants, one ran down and killed all of them (with all of us now shooting at it), got to me with only a few HP left, and still nearly killed me. They're the reason I picked up the Animal Friend perk.
- While not quite as lethal, I think the Mirelurk Hunters and Giant Radscorpions deserve honorable mention. They are much stronger than their weaker variants, come out of nowehere once you hit a certain level, will kill you if you haven't been upgrading your combat skills, and the Mirelurks take very little damage unless you Attack Its Weak Point.
- The original Fallout had a single Deathclaw as an incredibly rare random encounter while traveling on the over world map; considering most of these random encounters are generally more of an annoyance than a challenge after awhile, any person playing Fallout for the first time (such as this troper) was in for a slaughtering.
These are so common in Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis that they actually get their own battle theme and a special icon in the game's Preexisting Encounters system. Early examples include the Bear, Owl Bear, Sword Geist and Shield Geist. You also get twice the normal AP for winning a battle containing one or more of them, so they can be worth the risk. Yes, the game gives this much fanfare to regular enemies that are much harder than the norm. Appropriately, actual bosses, by comparison, have a downright epic battle theme and look about as intimidating on the map as a red blob can.
Gaia Online gives us the Landshark, a monster that appears on servers with a particularly high population. It's also tough enough to take on whole groups of people twice as strong as the players normally found in the area it spawns in.
- At least until he was degraded to an optional boss who is only half a charge level stronger than the players usually in that area. To preserve the challenge, though, he can now only be attacked by someone whose CL is 7.0 or lower.
In Wizardry V, there is an optional level. If you go down there, the enemy strength widely varies. You might get some ghosts, which do almost no damage and have very low HP... or you might get enemies like Dark Lords and Arch Fiends who have several times more HP than even the end game boss and spam the best magic in the game, including a spell that can kill your entire party at once if you're unlucky and another spell that does around 100 damage to everyone when triple digit HP is a big deal and healing is hard. They might attack you normally instead, in which case the target, if not killed by raw damage is probably instant killed anyways, and drained about 5 levels. They also spawn with lesser (but still powerful) demons, who throw in more firepower. Worst part is while you aren't technically required to go down there, it's the only way to get the best equipment in the game, which among other things gives you the magic resistance you need to not die in 1-2 rounds against... nearly any late game enemy. Especially the aforementioned end game boss. To be fair though, it does play the boss music to warn you... but it's still a random encounter, and you might not be able to escape.
Slivers in Tales Of Symphonia, a slightly less powerful version of the Sand Worm (also technically not a boss, but not encountered randomly and guarding one of the Devil Arms). They appear very rarely in the snow fields near Flanoir. Very, very rarely. Will probably be the last monster you need to complete your Monster Guide.
The Bahamutt enemy in Super Mario RPG straddles the line between this and Sub Boss, as it is only encountered when summoned by Chester or Magikoopa (a Chest Monster and Boss, respectively). It has a unique sprite, packs stats that are stronger than most bosses fought in the final area and is one of two non-boss enemies to have over 1000 HP. Also, it has an attack that causes Fear, halving a character's Attack and Defense.
Doom series: Arch-Viles, Barons of Hell, Mancubi, Hell Knights in Doom 3, Bruisers in Resurrection of Evil.
Quake 2 and 4: Tanks, which themselves have an Elite Mook variation, Gladiators, Harvesters, Iron Maidens(Q4), Stream Protectors, etc. One room near the end of Q4 is a Multi Mook Melee with these types of enemies.
- The Super Tank, and the Hornet/Tankflyer, which may be considered King Mooks that reappear as Degraded Bosses.
- The Quake III Arena Mod "Hunt" subverts it a little by having no actual bosses. But out of the three types of monsters, the Titans are definitely the closest thing you can get. (though they are complete raving lunatics and will attack their own team, including other Titans). The best strategy for these guys is to snipe from afar or to hit them with the BFG. The mod itself is so customizable that it's simple to make EVERY SINGLE ENEMY like this.
Dactyls in Titan Quest only look a little different than other mooks in the dungeon where you find them, but they will paint the floor with your innards if you aren't expecting anything different. Then they'll do it again if you were expecting something different.
Persona 4 sometimes features random encounters ten levels above the norm for the particular dungeon they may be found in. These enemies will generally be able to kill anyone in your party in a single hit - and sometimes all of them in a single attack. Even then, there are encounters in which you'll be up against three or more enemies your own level who all cast high-probability instant party kill spells every turn. Three guesses who developed and published the game.
Though a staple in most rogue-likes, Elona has a particularly nasty variety of them. Adamantium Golems are green golems with incredible power, defense, health, and damage-adding abilities. Note that up until this point, golems merely advance in power consistently. Don't mistake them for being this game's Incredible Hulk, however, they are actually his much more indestructible rival/ally Wolverine. By the time you land a second critical hit, which seems to this troper the only thing that will actually kill them, they may've healed up the damage from the first. In the lower levels, mutants qualify, as mutants spawn with A) a random amount of limbs, and B) totally random equipment, 30% of the time it is magical in nature. Woe to the player who discovers a three-armed mutant with an enhanced weapon and shield. Both of these are encountered more rarely than other random monster spawns at the same level. If in a dungeon whose levels randomly generate, the best course of action to deal with an adamantium golem is to zap it with a rod of teleport, then flee up or down the stairs and come back. Note that for the truly unlucky, any enemy in the game may spawn as a random dungeon's "last floor boss," making the Addies more terrifying still. See also quicklings, simply replace the abundance of defense with speed.
- There is also the Shub-Niggurath, a rare spawn at about level 25+, who is pretty tough to kill. Luckily, they are only half-assed hostile, prefering to summon other creatures to do their bidding or hit you with mind-screw sanity-altering affects, as their name would imply. They only directly attack you if you engage them in melee combat. Their biggest danger comes from the randomness of their summons, as they may summon something that will mop the floor with you, even if you're to the point you can one-shot a Shubby. Like the golem mentioned prior. Still, that's an incomprehensibly rare occurence. More often than not they may even summon neutral or friendly NP Cs who will help you fight them off. It's all chance when dealing with these, really.
In Eternal Ring(hmm, game's not on here) there is a secret area that is reached by going back through the starting cave and hitting the door on the beach with a dark or light spell. Inside are rats that are easily one-shotted, floaty orbs that die in three pokes of a sword, but go on a (long)self destruct timer, and the werewolves. They take several castings of the weapon or dragon summoning spells (dragon spells are as big as it gets here), they take more than half my HP even now with their attacks, and I'm approaching the final boss after grinding about 10 levels in this secret map! There are giant fish dudes somewhere in here too. They're harder to kill, but don't move, and I can't find them anymore.
Hunters in Prototype start off this way — they're tough but manageable alone, but in groups, it's generally best to just get out of there — but are demoted out of this status as you get more powerful. Shortly thereafter, the Leader Hunters step in to pick up the slack.