This page is for venting on bosses that gave large numbers of people grief. They do not need advice on how to beat them. They already know how to find GameFAQs.
The page isn't for you to talk about how great you are at the game either. Save that for your blog.
NOTE: Final Boss and Wake-Up Call Boss cannot be That One Boss without being overly hard by their standards. Please do not add them as examples. Superboss is completely banned. They are supposed to be overpowered and have no real standards.
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Metal Gear Series
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater:
- The End is enough of That One Boss that Konami put in two different ways to defeat him without fighting. If you don't kill him at the dam or wait for him to die of old age during the boss fight, you're in for one of the toughest sniper duels in video game history. Prepare to spend a good hour fighting him. Finding where he's hiding without being spotted yourself is damn hard, as he's got fantastic camouflage. Picking a single spot and waiting in first-person mode to ambush him results in him knocking you out from behind. Letting him see the glint off your scope gets you a tranquilizer round in the eyeball. And don't expect him to sit still either; he's stalking you even while you're looking for him. And if you want to get the stamina-kill to get his camo and the Mosin Nagant tranquilizer sniper rifle, you have to do this all with your tranq-pistol, which means getting in close.
- The Fury is a likely candidate. Early on in the fight, it's as simple as swerving between corridors and taking potshots at him. Soon enough, he gets pissed and starts going all-out with his flamethrower. Suddenly, he now always knows your exact position, and starts shooting his flamethrower down entire corridors. Not only does this give you a small margin in which to actually nail him with your weapons, but the fire also makes it a bit hard to even see where you're aiming.
- The fight against The Sorrow is a complete Mind Screw, because you can't defeat him in any of the normal ways: you can't kill someone who is already dead. Not to mention, he summons the ghosts of everyone you have ever harmed to greet you along the way. The only way to beat him is to allow him to lead to your death and then pop the revival pill at just the right moment. Players who don't know how the fight works may rip out a lot of hair over this one. Honestly, you could make an argument for most of the Cobra Unit being That One Boss.
- Metal Gear Solid:
- The Hind-D fight. You may not know you can destroy the gun-cams with stingers or stop them from firing on you for a short time with Chaff Grenades and end up losing rations running up the damn stairs — making what should simply be an annoying boss almost impossible, not to mention it's really hard to get good 360 cover while still having a good area to aim the missiles.
- Psycho Mantis, who is fairly easy — once you've figured out the fourth-wall-obliterating puzzle you need to solve just so you can hit him at all, of course. He can still be a pain though with him throwing all of that goddamn furniture everywhere.
- Sniper Wolf can be this on the first playthrough since you are unlikely to know where Diazepam is and without it, the PSG-1 is a pain to control.
- That being said, the second time Snake faces Sniper Wolf is preposterously easy, as she can be taken down with Nikita rockets or Stingers while Snake is safely out of range. In the Twin Snakes, you don't get to cheap shot her if you want to defeat her non-lethally.
- Metal Gear REX itself is a pain in the ass, especially if you try to fight it from a distance in the original release on the original PlayStation. It's anti-tank rockets will home in on you unless you use Chaff Grenades, which will also knock out your radar for a short time. Getting too close to it will result in either getting a laser to the face or being stomped on. What really hits this home however is that you fight it twice: in the first fight against REX your target is the Radome on its left side, and the second time you face it you need to aim at Liquid.
- Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker had the AI weapons, since they take so long to take down and some of their attacks can be real tough to dodge. However, the second battle with Peace Walker itself is probably the worst, since it will also sometimes start a nuclear launch sequence, in which you have one minute to damage it enough to stop it, or you get game over and have to restart the entire fight again. It also has EMP pulses which will stop rockets from hitting it.
- Some of the custom vehicle fights, particularly the helicopter bombers, are incredibly frustrating, especially when you're trying to capture the damn thing intact.
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: Liquid Ocelot. Not because he's difficult, that's to be expected. It's because the game foists a whole new control scheme on the player. The only similar boss is the Rex vs Ray fight, which is hardly enough time to acclimatize to the timing and mechanics, especially since a 100-ton death machine controls a little differently than a CQC battle. Most of the frustration with Ocelot stems from the dodgy new dodge move, which is calibrated for an over-the-shoulder view....so naturally the first part of the Ocelot fight locks you into an overhead view and causes you to duck'n'weave straight into Ocelot's fist half the time. On the higher difficulties, this one boss can cause a no-deaths playthrough to start racking up the body count.
Other Games
- Poison Ivy from Batman: Arkham Asylum. The first part is manageable. But her second phase is pure undiluted hell, especially on Hard mode. Between her fast projectiles, her constant vine waves (which seem to have a bigger hitbox than they really seem) and her hypnotized henchmen joining the fun, it's a miracle players would be able to take down her second phase on their first try. Couple that with the fact that the only real way you can hit her is with Batarangs and Explosive Gel when she goes down in that short time frame you get to hit her, and you've got one of the hardest bosses in the game.
- Mr Freeze from Batman: Arkham City can be incredibly hard to defeat on higher difficulties, as his health and damage increase substantially between them, and consequently you need to use more and more strategies to whittle down his health. Many of Freeze's countermeasures prevent Batman from using important gadgets and skills, which makes the fight progressively harder as Freeze's health goes down. Furthermore, on harder difficulties, Freeze can kill you in seconds if he locks on to you, and he's absolutely relentless, and will constantly deploy seeker drones to trace your heat signature when he loses sight of you. The New Game Plus mode takes up to the max as it will force you to use all twelve options to take down Freeze and if you haven't mastered certain ones...
- Batman: Arkham Knight has the titular Knight in his vehicle fight. The first stage of the fight involves picking off Cobra drones, which are hard enough to subdue on their own, and even more so when the Arkham Knight orders them to turn around and scan behind them (often when you're right there, waiting for your shot). Then you have to deal with the big man himself in his Cloudburst. Unlike the other Cobras, which only need to be hit once, the Cloudburst needs to be hit four times, and since the Cloudburst has perfect 360 vision it is impossible to sneak up on him — your only option is to fire off a shot then run like hell and hope his extremely accurate targeting system doesn't kill you in one hit. Oh, and sometimes the tanks will spawn facing in your direction.
- The titular Knight isn't much easier when he's driving the Excavator. The fight starts with you running the Batmobile through an obstacle course with the Knight in pursuit. If you hit a single obstacle, the Excavator will crush you. Which is made worse by how the car starts the fight facing the Excavator, forcing you to pull a quick 180 or die before the chase even begins. After that section, the Excavator stalks you through a maze of tunnels. The objective is to lead it through three specific tunnels, in order to force it to hit explosives at the end of those tunnels. Again, though, these tunnels are filled with obstacles, and hitting a single one is death. You'd better have gotten really good at driving the Batmobile. The only saving grace is that there are checkpoints after each successful tunnel.
- From Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Barrett, the first boss of the original version of the game. He has a minigun on his hand that will shred you in seconds, has a tendency to toss around grenades like they're going out of style, takes a lot of damage before he goes down, does not go down from nonlethal weapons, moves surprisingly fast despite his casual swagger, and you can't use your knockout or instant kill moves on him. And if you get too close to him? He'll use a version of that attack on you. And you absolutely have to kill him. You can't get out of the room until you do. To make matters worse, up till now you've probably been following a stealthy strategy to rack up points and avoid getting shot to death, so you might not even have any combat-oriented augs or lethal weapons to fight him withnote . This all counts for the original. In the remake it's somewhat more viable for people who haven't focused on a combat playstyle.
- Say Hello To My Little Friend from Hitman: Codename 47 is the hardest mission in the game, and the only target in the series to be inexplicably durable. First off, it's actually impossible to stealth through, as at some point, you will make yourself known. Then there's the objective to blow up the drug stash, which is protected by guards who will shoot on sight. Then you have to do a shootout against a coked-up Tony-Montana wannabe with a full-auto machine gun, who only goes down after filling him with his weight in lead. Then you have to make a mad dash to the plane while under fire. Oh, and this game doesn't have any way to save mid-mission, so you'll have to do everything all over again if you fail. Have fun.
- This level becomes ridiculously easy, however, if you found the sniper rifle in the previous level. You can see him and snipe him through a window, and save yourself all that trouble.
- This is an odd case. It takes less than ten shots with a pistol to kill Tony Montana. You just have to wait a while between shots. He has a period of Mercy Invincibility after each successful hit. If he doesn't say anything when you shoot him, you haven't waited long enough. It makes the fight easy but boring. The rest is crazily hard, though. It's best to kill Montana first after you've knifed everyone in the house in the right order, then go to the drug stash.
- This is very similar for every game in the Hitman franchise. These days, it is considered that Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is virtually impossible to complete with the titular Silent Assassin rating, and the entire series is considered difficult. Somewhat averting this trope, however, in that most of the targets outside of Hitman: Absolution have about as much health and firepower as the regular mooks.
- In Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain, Iwao Ryusaki, the security chief of Murakawa Tower, is likely the hardest boss in the game, especially if you haven't unlocked the frag grenades or air pistol by this point, and even then can be very frustrating. Not only is he heavily armored and immune to Dormagen gas and the taser, but he totes a minigun that will make chunky salsa of you if you linger in his line of sight for more than a fraction of a second.
