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Giant Space Flea From Nowhere
alt title(s): Random Boss; Space Flea
...I thought this game was about POACHERS, not giant space worms!

We expect bosses, situationally if not logically. They're going to be there after a save point (you hope), at the end of the dungeon, or the climax of the story. You may hate the Quirky Miniboss Squad or the Goldfish Poop Gang, but it makes sense you'll fight them, and then The Dragon later. Then maybe his boss, who might go all mutatey on you.

But bosses don't always mesh well with the storyline, with some functioning more as checks to make sure the party is leveled up properly to this point. And sometimes it feels like a game just wanted to give you something big to fight at the end of a plot thread for dramatic effect.

This is a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: A boss with no relevance whatsoever to the actual plot. They are frequently mindless creatures or beasts as opposed to actual characters, and tend to appear at the end of unimportant plot threads, such as Fetch Quests. Don't expect any of the characters to actually comment on these bosses after you've finished them off; they exist only to give you something to pummel at the end of a dungeon. They are sort of the opposite of the Boss In Mook Clothing: wheras the BIMC is a creature as hard as a boss which appears as a random encounter, the Giant Space Flea From Nowhere is a random encounter that happens to play the role of a boss.

Compare the non-videogame equivalent, the Big Lipped Alligator Moment.

Examples:

  • The Final Fantasy series has a bunch of them.
    • Final Fantasy IV contains a prototype for these types of enemies in Zeromus, its final boss. He had only a vague connection to the plot, as the hatred of the main villain given form, and seemed to be present largely to provide a massive, intimidating final boss — which Zemus very much wasn't.
      • Though to be fair, you do come in at the tail end of Fusoya and Golbez's showdown with Zemus, and the guy takes a Double Meteor spell before going down. So maybe if you had gotten there a little earlier...
    • Final Fantasy VI had Dullahan, a monster based on Celtic Mythology, appear for no reason in Darill's Tomb. No explanation, no build up, it just appears. To be fair, though, a lot of the ordinary monsters didn't make a whole lot of sense either — I mean, pierrot clowns inside a giant landworm's stomach?
      • In the final dungeon, Inferno, a palette swap of a previous boss, jumps down on one of the groups with no explanation for who he is or even any dialogue about him.
      • There's also Ultros, the most amusing Space Flea ever. He's a giant purple octopus who comes out of nowhere and decides to fight you. When you give him a beating, he escapes and later comes back to wreck the opera you're attending, among with other situations. No one knows why he hates the player characters so much.
      • Then there's Doom Gaze, who shows up in the World of Ruin as a literal random encounter while you're flying around in the airship. This troper was NOT expecting it and just about needed new pants the first time it attacked.
    • A few bosses were added to the English language localisation of Final Fantasy VII (and eventually carried over to the Japanese version as Final Fantasy VII International). Schizo, a two-headed dragon which appears for no obvious reason, was one of these. There's no dialogue given before the characters encounter the boss, just a bizarre polygon sequence; and the boss is That One Boss and encountered shortly before the player reaches a different, plot-based Recurring Boss.
      • Schizo is probably supposed to be a reference to the penultimate boss of FFIII, the two-headed dragon. Although why they would add such a reference to the version of the game meant for audiences that wouldn't even see a proper localization of said game in their country for another ten years is a total mystery.
      • Except Schizo's heads are different colors, whereas the original Two-Headed Dragon had golden scales all over its body.
      • There's also the Materia Keeper, who's just standing there, guarding the exit of Mount Nibel because... umm... someone has to?
      • This is Final Fantasy. Strange monsters stalk the world for people to attack for no apparent reason. These bosses shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Red Dragon is probably a better example, as it isn't suggested as being a guardian in the Temple of the Ancients OR a monster of Sephiroth's, but it attacks you in the room containing the Black Materia right after Sephiroth leaves.
    • Final Fantasy VIII has Abadon, who just appears out of nowhere as the party walks towards Esthar.
    • A similar example is Necron (nooo) in Final Fantasy IX, predominantly because he is also a final boss who appears suddenly and has no prior lead-up within the context of the storyline. Fans have come up with many Epileptic Trees concerning his relevance and existence, but nothing definitive is ever provided, and his existence is not even mentioned during the ending sequence. Even worse, he directly followed Kuja, a legitimate Big Bad. One is left wondering if the designers wouldn't have been better off making Kuja a Sequential Boss.
      • The webcomic {{Adventurers!}} directly referenced Necron with Necrevil
      • Word Of God says that Necron was a "thematic" final boss, acting to fight Zidane's desire to live with a being who represented total death (as opposed to Kuja, who was pretty much just deluded). The writers never even tried to tie him into the plot, though, stating he "could have" been several things.
      • The tree of life which was the crux of the plot exploded after his death. That's part of why it's a major issue. He has a very major plot role, and is important to the storyline. Just... we don't know how.
      • In the Japanese version, Necron's name (when translated directly into English) is "The Eternal Darkness". This is a pretty clear indication that he isn't meant to be a character at all, but just a thematic battle against a force of nature.
    • During the first three chapters of Final Fantasy X-2, you can go to Bikanel Island and salvage machina parts on scouting trips. On occasion, your companion robot will flash red and warn you of an incoming enemy, at which point the 333,444-HP boss Angra Mainyu will home in on you and strike. Though, it's not until Chapter 5 that you get to (properly) defeat him.
    • While we can't very well say that all the Notorious Monsters in Final Fantasy XI fit here, as most aren't part of a storyline, and others are actually mentioned before you meet them, there's not much mention of a giant angry snowball the size of a van with teeth. Most of them are at least thematically consistent with the areas they come from, though.
  • Dark Force, the final boss of Phantasy Star, was initially one of these, but was retconned into having an expanded role in the Phantasy Star mythos in later games. You can say that he "graduated" from Space Flea status.
    • Although this is still very much the case with "Dark Falz" in Phantasy Star Online. Granted, pretty much every boss was a Giant Space Flea, because the plot was entirely optional.
  • Dragon Quest II had one of the earliest examples of the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere final boss. After defeating the Big Bad of the game, Satan (Malroth/Sidoh in the US version), who he turned out to serve and worship, appears out of nowhere to be the final boss.
    • Dragon Quest in general is terrible about doing this to the final boss of the game. Even the very first one, the original text had the Dragonlord's pet superdragon come out of nowhere after you beat him (although the first translation changed this to his "true form" to help make the fight climactic and continuous.)
    • DQIII drops Zoma on you in a Not So Fast Bucko that, admittedly, turns pretty awesome but isn't foreshadowed even a tiny bit.
    • DQV has Mildrath, whose world is a dull Scrappy Level and who takes away from the satisfaction of defeating the really hateable earlier villains (although at least the game hints at his existence before insisting that he has to die right now).
      • The fact that the previous Big Bad was the High Priest of the Religion Of Evil might have explained it somewhat. Also, there is the fact that it's made cool when you consider that you're basically invading Hell, killing Satan, and getting revenge on the being who orchestrated every horrible thing that happened to your family the whole time.
    • Deathtamoor of DQVI gets namedropped pretty late in the game, as well, with his evil being pretty much Offstage Villainy, via his minions.
    • The only games which really avoid this are IV and VIII, who have villains who get some build up well in advance (DQVIII is particularly good about it, having him dog your steps from the very start of the game, even if you don't know it at first.)
      • Not that Dragon Quest VIII is without them, though. Megalodon and Ruin (from when you're trying to escape The Black Citadel both fit this trope pretty well.
  • In SaGa Frontier, one of the characters has as a final boss a gigantic actual Mecha Shiva that drops down from the roof of the church where she's pretending to have a wedding ceremony with the party in lieu of her dead boyfriend (who's actually the antagonist, although what relation he has to do with said multi-armed robot is unknown).
  • In Metal Combat, after defeating the "real" Anubis (who seems to be either a robot or a particularly extensive cyborg), you fought Typhon and his/her ST, Giga-Desp.
  • Breath Of Fire III was really bad: It would require you to battle dozens of non-plot-related bosses at seemingly random intervals. An example would be when you go to the beach to look for machine parts and are attacked by a giant fish. The game goes further by making you fight every one of these mini-bosses just before the final boss (making the whole thing seem like Filler).
    • I wonder where the hell the giant chicken in the McNeil chicken coop came from.
  • Discussed in the elaborate Strategy Guide for the remakes of both Lunar games. Designer company Working Designs chose to remove several Giant Space Fleas for just not making sense with the storyline. Of course, the remakes put a lot more emphasis on some of the badies that did make sense.
  • Skies Of Arcadia has quite a few of these. An overweight, acid-spewing rabbit, a giant robotic penguin with a death-ray, a floating tortoise that could make itself invincible, and a cockatrice-esque giant bird all appeared suddenly, were dispatched by the heroes, and died without comment from anyone.
    • There was a gigantic green blob in the game's sewer level (the aforementioned "acid-spewing rabbit"). What made him twice as bad was that not only does he come from nowhere, but after beating him, you immediately have to fight a boss that IS related to the story. That sequence sticks out in my mind as one of the toughest parts of the entire game, partially because it happens so early and your healing options are very limited.
  • The video game The Matrix: Path of Neo more or less proceeded with the plot of the three Matrix movies. Until the very end, when instead all of the Smiths morphed into one giant "Mega-Smith" to fight Neo. Atari-esque avatars of the Wachowski Brothers stopped the plot at that point to explain how the metaphorical ending of the movies didn't translate well into a video game. This may be true, but it did feel like they were making fun of the player. ("Have fun... and enjoy enlightenment!" [Both laugh])
  • Despair Embodied from Devil May Cry 2. He pops out of the carcass of the previous boss without any prior in-plot mention of his existence. On the other hand, given the quality of Devil May Cry 2's plot, that's not very different from anything else in the game. It's unfortunate, too, since he's probably the best thing the game has for boss fights.
    • Not probably, definitely. In this editor's opinion, Despair Embodied quite easily makes Argosax the Chaos (the aforementioned previous boss) look like a Dragon. Maybe even a filler.
  • Super Adventure Island II does this twice. The first one appears when you beat the giant bird hyped up as the final boss. Suddenly an evil wizard appears and steals Tina, and you have to play through the level again. When you kill the wizard, a giant space octopus appears, which is the real final boss. And you fight him in outer space for some inexplicable reason. There's some eerie music and mist filling the room when you kill the wizard, indicating the abrupt change in mood, which is nice, but you'd think the player deserves an explanation for this nonsense.
  • Immediately after defeating the first final boss of Gungrave, an "Alien Head" erupts from the ground, causing you to fall from the previous boss's arena to an entirely separate corridor, in which you fight him for the true final battle. There is no dialogue to give you any clue as to what the hell just happened, and after defeating it, you are inexplicably placed outside the structure you're in. Much like the rest of the final level, the game neglected to mention many key details about this being, including his non-mutated human form. Which is a shame, since he actually plays an important role in the backstory, but you wouldn't know this if you had merely played the game.
  • "Genji II is an action game which is based on Japanese history. The stages of the game will also be based on famous battles which took — actually took place in Ancient Japan. So here's this Giant Enemy Crab..."
  • Metal Slug 3's first four and a half levels are a fight against a human army... until you defeat the commander. At that point, an alien springs from his body, and the last half of the last level is a war against the invading aliens known as the Mars People. The series takes Refuge In Audacity, though, so most players's reactions are "Oh, cool!"
    • The Mars People appeared first in Metal Slug 2, with small, small clues in the game before they showed up, so their appearance in part 3 isn't entirely unexpected. No, the real kicker was in Metal Slug 6, when different aliens show up out of nowhere and start eating the Mars People.
    • Sol Dae Rokker, the boss of mission four, supposely "an artifact of the solar deity that some Japanese believe in". But again, some the alternative routes of the game have you fighting acid-spewing snails, zombies, man-eating plants, titanic maggots, jellyfishes bigger than your submarine and a squadron of the Japanese Army that isn't aware that the World War II ended decades ago.
      • Everybody calls it "Sol Dae Rokker" in English. However, "Sol de Roca" seems a more accurate transcription for the katakana in the original design sheets. Which makes sense since, well, it looks like a sun and it's made of rock. And the artifact design looks a lot like a mayan god IMHO, which would explain the Spanish in the name.
    • The Final Boss of Metal Slug 5 is another example of this trope. After fighting a terrorist cell for the whole game, your last opponent is... a giant demon.
  • Cave Story is solid for most of it (even the fight against a tiny superfast mushroom makes sense). Monster X and the giant fish, on the other hand, are literally out of nowhere. All the latter gives you is "Something's coming", and the former just suddenly tries to run you over once the boss music suddenly starts. Interestingly, the giant fish is apparently pulled directly out of one of the creator's earlier games. There's also the thing that unlocks the sun stones in the Sand Zone, and Heavy Press has no purpose at all except to make hell longer.
  • Wild Arms 5 lives and breathes this one. At least once a dungeon, the characters will walk into a room, exclaim, "something's coming!" and enter combat with a giant evil spider or the like that is literally shown appearing out of thin air.
    • The third game was even worse about this. At least WA5 provided minor introductory scenes, as noted above; frequently, in WA3, you'd be hit with the battle transition and the boss theme as soon as you walk into the room. The party defeats this monster in combat, then move on through the dungeon with absolutely no comment from anyone.
  • Every other boss in God Hand seems to be one of these. Mind you, it's part of the game's appeal: You know that a game is unique when you get to fight two Hard Gay twin thugs in stripperiffic ourfits, a Terrible Trio whose hobby is to cut random people's arms off, a masked gorilla who uses pro-wrestling moves, a rock duo from hell who attacks by shooting lazers and beams from their intruments, a group of five midgets dressed in Power Rangers style clothing, an afro-coifed black disco reject in a yellow vinyl suit, replete with arm tassels and flare bell bottom pants. Gene even comments this, after beating the Psychic Midget in the caverns, by saying that the paranoid old hermit seemed to pick the wrong game to appear in.
  • Parodied in Adventurers! — possibly even a direct parody of Necron — when, after finally defeating the distinctly non-Space-Flea Final Boss and fleeing his collapsing lair, the party is suddenly faced with Necrevil, "the embodiment of evil itself!"... and they just keep running.
  • Could be argued for the Grotesqueries in Drakengard. The characters cannot easily explain where they come from, or why they are devouring everyone. They just know that the moment they killed the Big Bad, all hell broke loose. This is definitely the case with the Queen Mother of the Grotesqueries however. She literally comes out of nowhere, and for some reason controls space and time. Some Epileptic Trees try to explain where she came from.
  • Xenogears had a bunch of these. Often, dungeons would just have an obligatory battle at the end because tradition says you need one.
  • A few times in Super Smash Bros Brawl's Subspace Emissary. Most of the bosses only make sense in retrospect. Aside from being evil, there's usually no real explanation. Case in point: Rayquaza attacking Diddy and Fox.
  • Parodied in Stinkoman 20X6. The boss of the Gradius-style level — where all of the Mooks are generic sea-life or robots that resemble them — is described in the manual (which initially had no picture of it) as "a small and speedy octopus or squid." (It's actually a robot gangster.)
  • The ending of No More Heroes has got to be a parody of this, with a long stream of nonsensical boss fights and totally non-foreshadowed plot twists which push Travis to break the Fourth Wall and complain that the developers are just making this up as they go along.
  • True Crime: Streets of L.A. has pretty much a whole chapter called House of Wu made of this trope. The boss of the chapter is a huge Chinese dragon that breathes fire and swims around a lava pit. Since the game is pretty much standard cop show material with no supernatual or weird stuff in it outside of that chapter, many consider it to be either a total Wallbanger or Narm. The developers admited this level was pretty much The Artifact of a prior build and apologized.
  • Mario And Luigi Superstar Saga had Trunkle, a rock-creature who suddenly appears at the end of the desert section to menace the princess for a distinctly nonspecific reason.
    • The Commander Shroob from Partners In Time is a noteworthy one, especially since he's the only Shroob you encounter on Star Hill. The Elder Shrooboid is a mixture of this and Deus Ex Machina, since before he fights you, he turns Kylie and Toadbert into mushrooms to prevent them from telling you the trutha bout the Cobalt Star.
  • On the whole, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is pretty good about making sure all its bosses are either connected to the plot in some way or at the very least foreshadowed. However, nothing whatsoever explains what happens when you break up the Princess's wedding to a minor villain: The chefs who prepared the wedding cake get upset that their work will be unappreciated, so they attack you. Then, the wedding cake inexplicably comes to life and uses its inexplicably vast magical powers to try and kill you for some inexplicable reason. What's worse is that this is one of the hardest boss fights in the game.
    • Punchinello from earlier in the game qualifies too. He has no lead-up, no one says anything about him, he's not one of the Big Bad's lackeys, and seems to have no reason to exist other than to make you fight someone for the third Star Piece. Punchinello badly wanted to be a feared supervillain, but nobody in the party knew who he was, and their asking him "who?" angers him so much that he attacks. His whole gag in the storyline is that he came from nowhere.
    • And then you infiltrate the main villain's weapon factory, and tying things in to the plot get thrown out the window. A giant clock that tells time to deal damage? Sure! Two jesters who summon a snake when one of them dies? That sounds fine, too! A Mini-Boss Rush that ends with a battle against a machine seemingly powered by egg yolk? Throw it in there, it's the end of the game and we need as many bosses as we can get!
  • Smorg from Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. While its individual components do cameo here and there throughout Chapter 6, the only apparent reason it exists is to give the chapter a boss fight that isn't Doopliss.
  • Many of the bosses from The Legend Of Zelda, at least in terms of storyline. However, they are vaguely thematically related to the dungeon they appear in. The final boss generally makes sense, though.
    • In Twilight Princess the last of the twilight bugs carrying the Tears of Light randomly turns out to be a literal giant space flea that is irritatingly difficult to subdue.
    • The last boss of Link's Awakening didn't make sense, though—and it was notable for hijacking Ganon—but then again, It Was All Just A Dream.
      • The boss was one of the Wind Fish's nightmares, remember? It was trying to keep you from waking up the Wind Fish and causing a Dream Apocalypse.
    • All of the four main bosses in Majora's Mask are exempt from this save one: a giant frozen robot goat. A giant. Frozen. Robot. Goat.
      • It's a BULL, actually. Named "Goht", so I can see where the confusion comes from.
      • ... and now it makes even less sense! At least some kinds of goats live up in the mountains where the temple was built! Who's ever heard of a mountain cow?!
      • Ahem...
  • The Chiropteran Behemoth from Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines. What the hell?! There's no explanation at all.
    • The Rokea (wereshark) and the Gargoyle don't count for that? To be fair, the game does a pretty good job of messing with players who aren't very familiar with the World Of Darkness and it's denizens. It probably wasn't Executive Medling, because, if the player is familiar with the African vampire clans, The Sheriff is very recognizable, as is his ability to shapeshift. The foreshadowing is just worthless to 99.9% of the people who played Bloodlines.
    • The Rokea, the Gargoyle and even the Blood Brothers make sense, as they're described in the rulebooks, but even The Other Wiki once pointed out that the size of the Sheriff's shapeshifting abilities was probably exaggerated so he'd be a better setup to the Anticlimax Boss.
    • Let's be fair: Before the Sheriff encounter, you fight enemies that transform into giant blobs, were-sharks, fanged reptiloid monsters and clawed anthropomorphic Bat-Monsters; if you play Gangrel, YOU can turn into an anthropomorphic bat-monster. The only really surprising thing about the final boss is that it's the first and only flying opponent you'll ever encounter in the game. And if you do have rulebook knowledge, you know that the high-level forms of at least two vampire disciplines could be used for such a transformation, or at least reasonably argued to allow for it (Vicissitude aka Fleshsculpting, and Protean aka animal-shapechanging).
      • And it so happens that The Sheriff comes from Nagloper clan, which is, basically, an African variant of the dreaded Tzimisce.
    • It's not so much the shapeshifting itself is surprising, as that could be understandable even to people who hadn't read the books. It's more that there's no transition at all. One minute you're fighting The Sheriff; you beat him, and it fades to black. Then, BAM! You'd think they'd have at least bothered to animate it.
  • Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament, as its title suggests, revolves around a tournament. However, the boss stages don't involve actually fighting the other competitors; instead, you have to race them, with your opponents acting like time limits and not otherwise showing up in the gameplay. The actual bosses of the game are just random creatures who appear on the track.
  • Verminator, of Secret of Evermore definitely qualifies as a Space Flea. None of the NPCs mention him, before or after the fight, nor are there any other hints of his existence. He just shows up out of nowhere as you're exploring Ebon Keep. He's one of the toughest bosses in the game, and there isn't much of a reward for defeating him aside from just being rid of him.
  • Lampshaded in Suikoden, where encountering a random boss enemy that is not referenced before or after causes one character to exclaim something along the lines of "What the hell!?" before the fight. It's also played straight with a few other encounters.
  • A whole bunch of these pop up in Chrono Trigger, more common as you approached the end (Giga Gaias, the Golem Twins, etc.). Particularly distracting is the cave near Medina, which exists exclusively to provide a Boss Battle. Ironically, the game's literal giant space flea is well-integrated into the plot.
    • Giga Gaia is probably the worst, given that it randomly appears without any dialogue mentioning it before or after the battle. At least the Golems were established as being Dalton's minions (he sics one on you in the throne room, then two in the Ocean Palace).
  • Ninja Gaiden II has one at the end of chapter seven. You've just finished dueling a boss who has a prominent part in the storyline, then the plane you are on crashes in the Arctic (or somewhere icy anyway) and a giant ankylosaurus made of molten rock appears out of the ground to fight you. To add insult to injury, when you defeat the boss, it will explode in what seems to be a cutscene... but is an actual explosion which will kill you if you're caught in it.
    • If I recall correctly, the existence of the 'Armadillo' is mentioned on the airship prior to the boss fight, so it's not really from nowhere, just very unexpected.
  • Jashin, the true final boss of the NES version of Ninja Gaiden. And the Cerberus/Kelberos boss battle in Stage 4.
  • After you defeat the supposed Big Bad in the arcade version of Astyanax, you suddenly find yourself in the true final stage, which is a technorganic alien hive complete with eggs and facehuggers. At the end, of course is the "Queen Alien", which obviously looks like a Xenomorph from the Alien movies. Space Flea Hive Level From Nowhere?
  • Chernabog from Kingdom Hearts. He literally appears out of nowhere, after you've jumped through the hole in "The End of the World". You don't know who he is, Sora makes no comment about him whatsoever, it's never explained if he's a Heartless, what connection he's got to Xehanort or why he's even there, he's the only boss who doesn't get an entry in Jimminy Cricket's journal and he's never mentioned again. It's as though the developers just thought it would be a disservice not to include one of the most impressive Disney creations, even if they had to just drop it in without so much as a single word of context.
    • He's there because Bald Mountain got wiped out and he has nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do
    • Darkside in Chain of Memories is a particularly good example, as he mysteriously appears in the Key of Guidance room in Destiny Islands so that the world can have a boss fight.
  • In the series finale of Thundercats, after Lion-O fights an epic final battle against his Arch Enemy Mumm-ra, the Evil Spirits randomly throw "their champion", a giant warrior named Pyron, at Lion-O just to fill up the last couple of minutes or so of the episode.
  • Castle Crashers also does this in the final level. Even though the Cyclops and Black Knight are both encountered in earlier levels, on the final level you fight a guy with a toolbox for a head that draws bad flash animation.
    • The paint guy was shown carrying the fourth princess just before the sequence where you chase the flying castle.
  • The Japanese version of Frankenstein Conquers The World climaxes in a fight between Frankensteins Monster and a giant octopus with no plot relevence. The scene was cut from the English dub.
    Human guy: "Oh my God! That's a giant octopus!"
  • The platformer game series Turrican LOVES this trope. Most of the bosses don't fit into whatever plot the games have. (Giant alien monster, flying ram with laser cannons, etc.) A few examples includes this this this this and this. Not even the end boss of Turrican 2 looked like the Big Bad you saw in the intro. Fighting him happens in the third game though.
  • The Sega Mega Drive game Alien Soldier IS this trope. ENTIRELY. Nearly every enemy (enemy in this case being equivalent to a boss in every other game) is unexplained save for a few, usually ungodly powerful, and progressively stranger (giant crabs in an airport, a giant cyborg wolf cowboy with a machine gun arm riding a robot horse that can crawl, etc). You cannot go longer than a minute or two without running into something giant, random, and unexplained.
  • The film Ebirah: Horror Of The Deep (AKA Godzilla VS The Sea Monster) features a scene where Godzilla randomly fights a giant condor. It doesn't even explain in the film WHY the condor was there in the first place or why it was attacking Godzilla.
    • Don't forget Hedorah's pointless ten-second cameo in Final Wars. It's like he's just randomly there just so Godzilla can have yet ANOTHER monster to defeat in less than a minute.
  • None of the bosses in The Guardian Legend really have a connection to the plot, but the stand-out Space Flea From Nowhere boss is the Final Boss "It", a cyclopean tentacled monstrosity which suddenly confronts the Guardian in outer space after she's escaped from the asteroid(and endured a Boss Rush).
  • Castlevania Aria of Sorrow's Good Ending. Soma Cruz decides to fight the force of Chaos trying to subvert him. Its form? Is it Dracula? Death? No it's a snake...thing with four gems shooting at you. And um, three statues? This Troper calls it "the last boss Contra forgot."
    • The final boss in the sequel Dawn of Sorrow also qualifies, since no one expected it to burst out of Dmitri's body as a fusion of all the demons he dominated.
    • It's fairly similar, in look and style, to the Parasite boss of Lament of Innocence, though still incredibly random.
  • The Transforming Mecha "Mr. Heli Robo" in Contra: Shattered Soldier, which first momentarily appears as a Bait And Switch Boss in Mission 1 before getting crushed by the mutant turtle. Then it comes Back From The Dead at the beginning of the first True Final Boss stage.
  • Metroid Fusion has a Security Drone that you face in PYR. It is the only boss in the entire game not infected with an X-Parasite and it doesn't even give you an item (the item you get during that period, the Super Missile, comes right beforehand). However, it does become more relevant when you face it a second time later on in the game and it IS infected.
    • I think the intention was that it was infected during both fights. The narrator/guide only realized it before the second one. And wasn't its first appearance after you trespassed in a secure arena, probably alerting it?
    • In Metroid Prime 2 is the Caretaker Class Drone, the only boss in the game that is not in any way related to the Ing and was only built by the Luminoth to test out their Boost Ball technology. It doesn't give you any items either, so its situation is almost exactly like the Security Drone in Metroid Fusion, only it doesn't end up falling prey to the Ing by the end of the game.
  • Mr. X, the Implacable Man in the second scenario of Resident Evil 2, to some degree. At first, he appears out of nowhere and seems to have no purpose in the plot, but towards the end it is revealed that he is after a sample of the G-Virus.
    • It's strongly hinted throughout the game that Mr. X is a modified and perfected Tyrant model, a Tyrant being the final boss of the first game; so it's not really that much of a surprise.
  • The Star Fox series loves this trope, particularly the 64 iteration. Nearly all of the level bosses just suddenly show up with little foreshadowing or dialogue to announce who or what they are until they actually appear.
  • Battle of Giants: Dinosaurs has Mystery Bosses, who are not super dinosaurs, but instead angry inanimate objects. They include monster trucks, rockets, telephone boxes, and a schoolhouse. It's jarring because otherwise you're in some kind of Land Before Time-esque world filled with dinosaurs, and no explanation is give for the phone boxes attacking you. On the other hand, seeing a T-Rex beat up a school is crazy awesome.
  • Marvel Super Heroes Versus Street Fighter: The seventh round is Apocalypse, fair enough... and then, Suddenly, Cyber-Akuma!
    • Akuma similarly comes from nowhere to face you in Puzzle Fighter (then again, the boss you were "supposed" to fight is Dan Hibiki)
    • If you said that Yami would be the boss of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom prior to its release, everyone would be mocking you.
  • The Queen Spydor of Chibi-Robo is both a space flea in terms of plot and in gameplay, in that it appears out of near-nowhere in the finale and is a boss in a game where combat is practically non-existant....and it still manages to fit into the whole thing fairly well and be completely awesome.
  • This tropes acknowledges that most of the .hack// franchise is All There In The Manual, but no explanation could stop him from seeing Cubia as a GSFFN. Specially in G.U., where it is completely unnecessary to the plot whatsoever.
  • So you're playing Secret of Mana, wandering through a lovely ice forest and enjoying the serene music. Then as you cross to a new screen, you run into Boreal Face, a boss that not only looks suspiciously similar to a previous boss, but is completely unexpected and completely irrelevant to the plot.
    • Most of the bosses after Matango, with a few exceptions, are either related to the Empire or Giant Space Fleas From Nowhere, the latter of which is especially present in the Gold Tower.
  • Pretty much every single boss in Gunstar Heroes and its sequel imbodies this trope. Case in point the board game level, which features a giant face named Melon Bread, a bunch of little slime men that swarm you and only have 1 HP each, a giant gumdrop that summons clones that explode for no reason, and a teddy bear that can be defeated by being run over by a car. I'd list more, but the sheer number alone would hurt my brain.
    • Simply landing on the Curry and Rice boardgame space is enough to elicit a Big No from this troper. A sentient creature made of curry and rice, no guns, punches and kicks only, final destination. Oh, and to top off the fact that he can predict your moves, when you finally kill him, his head pops off and attempts to land and explode on you.
  • Kil'jaeden, the Final Boss of the first World of Warcraft expansion, The Burning Crusade, could easily be considered one of these by players who aren't well versed in the background story of the game. It's not so much that he's an unknown entity (he's not), but that all of the marketing of Burning Crusade was focused exclusively on Illidan, the final boss of the Black Temple. Kil'jaeden, despite being one of the canonical Big Bads of the series, got almost no mention at all from the in-game story until suddenly being introduced in patch 2.4. Despite this, Sunwell Plateau (where you fight Kil'jaeden) is widely considered a Crowning Moment Of Awesome in terms of dungeon design.
    • Blizzard has actually stated themselves that they released Black Temple too early and needed to find some way to keep everyone interested in the game. Still, it worked.
    • Come to think of it, all of the Elemental Lords can be considered this. The players decide to take out Ragnaros the Firelord just because he's there, and his only objective is to kill the much more evil dragon at the top of the mountain. Then you have C'thun. It seems that Blizzard had decided that they had better make that barren wasteland that has nothing significant in it useful by opening up a raid dungeon. Even when going in there, you would think that the Big Bad of the dungeon would be a giant bug...but it's an Eldritch Abomination whose name hadn't even been so much as mentioned up until that point.
  • Arguably, Blues aka Proto Man's first appearance in Mega Man 3 qualifies. He made sense later on, but that first time, he was just kinda...there.
  • Shining Force II: The Kraken. There might have been passing mention of a sea monster, but this fight occurs in a river. It's at a junction in said river, and the fight comes out of nowhere. It doesn't hurt that this fight is so much harder than anything before or afterwards, so much so that it's probably one of the few cases of Sequence Breaking by the AI of a video game. If the Big Bad actually sent the Kraken or something, it's one of the few times a video game villain actually did something fairly logical with their immense power (i.e. blitzing the heroes before they can level up).
  • Non-game example: An early season 2 episode of Ben10 had a literal Giant Space Flea From Nowhere, which Ben was only able to defeat using his newest (at the time) alien.
  • Apocalymon, the final villain of the original Digimon series, literally shows up out of nowhere in an outer space-like battlefield, and is fought and defeated within the course of two episodes.
  • Another non-game moment, which most people might chalk up as more of an Ass Pull in many cases: In the last episode of the first season of Gundam 00, after Setsuna takes down the Fake Boss, Graham Aker shows up out of flippin nowhere, bringing along his Crowning Musicof Awesome and a copy GN Drive shoved in his Elite Mook robot's back. Then he and Setsuna kick the piss out of each other. May be slightly subverted, as they do show Aker having some crews put the drive in his Flag in an earlier episode.
  • The Granstream Saga manages to produce a boss from nowhere, tying it into the plot while simultaneously nullifying the rest of the point of the game, which is a bit of an achievement. After you've happily completed the game's quest across four floating continents to save them from falling into the sea, you're sucked into a black hole where you're told by somebody called Demaar that the whole world was an illusion and that you have to fight him to break a hundreds-of-years long cycle. To call it out of nowhere would be something of an understatement.
  • Subverted in Fable 2: If you weren't paying attention, the Tower Shard seems like one...But if you were, you realize it's pretty important before then, and that it actually attacked you. So really, if you didn't see it coming, you only have yourself to blame for having you head up your ass.
  • The classic X-Men arcade game inexplicably throws Avengers villain Ultron at you at one point, despite having no relevance to the story and no dealings with the X-Men in the comic book.
    • Actually the boss is indeed an X-Men villain, a Sentinel known as Nimrod. It still doesn't make any sense why he would be working for Magneto though, since he was designed to hunt and kill mutants. The same could be said of Wendigo, another boss in the game who has no connection with Magneto.
  • The third boss in the freeware game Assassin Blue arguably qualifies. Up to this point, the game has been consistent with a realistic setting, with some fantastic bits, but is for the most part low-fantasy. Then comes the third boss, a floating stone head that shoots lasers. It certainly doesn't fit what was in the game before it, or indeed after it, and the battle and the level it's in feel incredibly tacked-on.
  • The boss of the Sandopolis zone act 1 from th Sonic The Hedgehog game Sonic and Knuckles. All of the other bosses in the game (and in fact most other sonic games) are either Robotnik or his robotic henchmen. And then at the end of Sandopolis we get this big huge...golem thingy that you have to trick into the nearby quicksand pit. Yeah.
    • The strange robotic Sonic (who seems different from Metal Sonic) in Sky Sanctuary Zone definitely counts, especially since it's the final boss for Knuckles.
  • The giant fish boss in Gears Of War 2 is essentially this, not being referenced at all in the storyline beyond some foreshadowing immediately before its arrival. It gets away with it by being awesome.
  • The 'Big-Bad' in DC's "Final Crisis," WASN'T Darkseid. It was a Multiversal Vampire. This means exactly what you think it does: he eats stories. His existence apparently showed up in ancillary material. This could have been forgivable since Word Of God stated that because of the depth of story there were two categories of 'ancillary' the 'tie in' and the literal supplements (which were identified as such by the cover design and the prefix 'FINAL CRISIS"). Which would have been fine, except they weren't. 'Rage of the Red Lanterns' fit the guide as a 'supplement' yet had no connection to Final Crisis at all.
    • I don't know if its just me, but Mandrakk feels like some opportunistic monster who used the singularity created by Darkseid to invade the Multiverse. Darkseid was much better developed, and almost destroyed reality.
  • The Biolizard from Sonic Adventure 2 could half-count as a GSFFN. Some earlier context mentions a prototype ultimate life-form, but never actually refers to what it is (though all is explained after the battle). Imagine running through a space station to turn off a giant death-ray that was on a timer to destroy the world in an hour, reaching the control room, than seeing a giant orange lizard on life-support appear in a flash of light 3 feet in front of you. Then, once you fight it, you find out about one-tenth of the information needed to understand its existence, and it teleports away so that you can fight it while it's anally impaled by the previously mentioned death ray.
    • It did appear briefly in the Dark Side story. Look closely at the picture Rouge finds when she's examining the data from Project Shadow.
  • Nearly every boss in Mother 3.
  • EVERY SINGLE BOSS in Light Crusader except Bloodroke and Ramiah/Huster.
  • Seiken Denesetsu 3's final bosses are all giant space fleas form nowhere. The player defeats one of the three villains they originally set out to defeat only to have someone else be summoned or appear and destroy them. Oh guess who's the final boss?
  • Surt of Valkyrie Profile didn't really have any build-up but that more or less assumes you know Norse Mythology and knew who he was.
  • Heinrich from Conker's Bad Fur Day.
  • As depicted above, the final boss from the hideous brawler Growl might be the ultimate example of this trope, since the game is all about beating to death hordes of poachers and freeing captive animals. When you take out their leader (a masked freak with enough strenght to throw you a friggin' tank) his corpse begins to slither around the arena and then A GIANT MILLIPEDE BURSTS OUT OF HIS BACK. AND THE GAME EXPLAINS THAT IT'S THE TRUE LEADER OF THE POACHERS. Seriously, what the hell???
  • Baten Kaitos: The Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean had several other-dimensional worm.. insect...opoids...things which would break trough into "our" reality where the barrier was weak.
  • Punch Out Wii has one when you get to fight a hidden boxer. Donkey Kong. Yes, the same Donkey Kong who beat up Kremlings and played with Mario in sports and go karts. He has no relations to the Punch Out franchise at all.
    • He's in the audience of the arcade Punch Out games so it's not's completely random. It's certainly unexpected though.
      • And if Mario can ref, why not?
  • Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare features a battle with a nightmarish Insectoid Winged Demon from Nowhere mini boss in the Library.
  • Postal 2 was a semi-realistic game in that there were no "bosses" or monsters, just a free-roaming journey through a town inhabited by assorted screwed-up gun-toting humans with varying levels of craziness. Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend ends with the sudden and completely out-of-left-field appearance of a "final boss" in the form of a 20-foot tall demonic half-cow half-man who declares "I am thy King! Kosher Zombie Mad Cow, God of Hellfire! All bow down, and worship my asscock!". The Postal Dude promptly lampshades the trope by stating "Some designer has lost his tiny mind".
  • Winback: Jin, the ninja boss, is a blatant example. He is the only boss in the game to not have any introductory dialogue before the battle.
  • The final boss of Razing Storm is an enormous skull-shaped battleship. Then again, the rest of the game's plot made little sense.
  • Guild Wars has one of these in Eye of the North (the Disk of Chaos) It has a unique model, is one of the highest damage and hit point creatures in the game, with regeneration, and is never mentioned before or since.
  • In Tabletop Games like Dungeons And Dragons, these are called "Wandering Monsters," and there are charts the game master can use to randomly determine what sort of potentially nasty but non-plot related critter the players may encounter while traveling in different terrains.
  • In Double Dragon II's arcade version, the purple Lee Brother ghost is one, as it comes out after the players defeat Willy. The mysterious warrior in the NES version is another, as he's never hinted at before.
  • "Caduceus", the final boss of Strider 2, not only pops out of nowhere with no explanation or relevance to the (admittedly paper-thin) plot... but is in fact gigantic, fought in outer space, and unmistakably flea-like.
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