YMMV / Minecraft Adventure Maps

• Anticlimax Boss: This is a very common problem, due to how hard it is to make boss fights challenging in Minecraft. Editing programs and Command Blocks can help, but it's still far from perfect.
  • The Glowstone Heart from The Gourd Avenger can't attack or defend itself, and all you have to do is pull a Lever to set off explosives and destroy it. Well, it is a lump of rock, so that's understandable, but it's not even hard to pull the Lever. It's just a straight bridge with no hazards and no opposition apart from some Zombie Pigmen (who don't attack you unless you attack them) and a single Ghast (which can easily get stuck and be sniped with impunity, and doesn't take much to bring down).
  • At the very end of The Return, you finally confront Burgmund to find that he's transformed himself into the Pigman Mothership, which must be destroyed… in exactly the same way as the other Pigman Pods: going inside it and blowing it up. There is a short section where you have to jump across some Lava, but apart from that you just place the TNT, walk away, and detonate it, and all your problems are solved.
  • The final battle of Calmere Nightmare 2 is against a Shoggoth summoned by the cult. It's represented by a Ghast. Unfortunately, it's in a small cave so it can't really move around much, and doesn't take too many hits from your decent weapons, so you can just run up to it, hit it for a few seconds, and win, probably without taking damage.
  • Despite the fact that she spends the preceding section bragging about how easily she'll kill you, the fight with GLAFLOSH might just be the easiest part of It's Better Together. All she does is sit there and occasionally chuck Arrows or TNT and dump Water in places, but all in completely random directions, and even if you happen to be in a position where her "attacks" could hit you, they're trivially easy to avoid. All you have to do to hurt her is stand on a Pressure Plate and then ignite a block of TNT. Repeat four times, then enter a featureless room, light the Core on fire with no opposition at all, and win.
  • At the end of the bonus section of Monarch Of Madness, you might be expecting a confrontation with Bogmire, or at least an epic final challenge. Instead, the final puzzle is very short and simple, and after that you just pull a lever to blow the whole Twilight Steeple up.
  • The final boss of The Pumpkin Prince 2 is Senros J. Majek. His first form just has you hopping along short elevated pathways to pour Water on Lava, while he occasionally spawns a few minions somewhere in the large room. The second phase isn't quite as pathetic, as there's more minions in a smaller space and you have to shoot shielded targets to kill him, but it's still not much hassle, especially if you grabbed the Potions in the previous room. There were several harder battles throughout the map.
  • The last battle in Archer Hero is against a giant Iron Golem. It's an immobile structure that doesn't attack, but while hitting its weak points, you also have to deal with a load of other monsters. The problem? There's a series of platforms on the opposite wall that you have to climb up to be able to shoot any of its many weak points other than the lowest ones, and once you climb up, the monsters can't hit you and you can shoot it with impunity.
  • In The Fall Of Gondolin, after fighting off an entire army besieging a city, what's the last foe you face on your way to escape? A Balrog. Yes, a BALROG. The thing is... this being Minecraft, it's just a model made out of blocks. But even more than that, it doesn't even attack you, nor does it have any flunkies to do so for it. All you have to do is walk around the edge of the cave to pull two Levers, then it dies. You can get hurt if you fall into the pit in the middle of the cave, but apart from that, there's no way to lose.
  • The incredibly So Bad, It's Good adventure map The Infected doesn't disappoint in having a facepalm-worthy final "battle". The alleged boss, the Zombie Chief, isn't even fought. You enter his room, push a Button that spawns a few Zombies, kill them, and that's it. And when we say "that's it" we mean that's all that happens — there's No Ending.
  • Pyramid Adventure's final boss, the Pharaoh, might be hard in theory: he has lots of health, high damage, and a long reach. But in practice… he has nothing else (apart from two very weak minions). He's just a stat-boosted retextured Zombie Pigman who can't do anything besides rush at you and hit you with his sword. All you have to do is hit him for a while, and while you might die a bit, when you die, you respawn in the boss room with your full inventory, so you can just continuously rush him until he dies, which will take maybe one minute due to you having powerful weapons and armour.
  • Both Herobrine and the Wither in Herobrine's Mansion. The former can summon the other bosses, but they don't have any of their minions and special abilities, so they're much easier than the original fights, while Herobrine himself only has one ability, which paralyses you for a few seconds and does minuscule damage; apart from that, he can only rush you with his axe, making his fight definitely on the easy side. As for the latter, by the time you face it, you'll have overpowered enough gear to not take much damage from its attacks, making the fight just a matter of killing weak mooks over and over to get enough Crystals Of Anger to buy Heavenly Grace, after which it goes down in about four hits.
  • The last battle of Wrath Of The Fallen is an incredibly long, hard, and epic ordeal… except the last phase. That's when you face the real final boss: Grobo the Giant. No special abilities, no stage hazards, no fancy effects, just an ordinary Giant Mook and a few other enemies. What's more, if you shoot him continuously, you can prevent him from advancing and kill him before he can even touch you.
  • Given that Zombie Apocalypse is all about massive battles with the Zombie armies, you'd be expecting an epic final battle. Instead, the last section isn't even very combat focused, and is remarkably easy. The puzzles you have to solve after that are a bit tricky, but what's the very last thing you must accomplish? You shoot four targets on the wall with no enemies or opposition of any kind.
  • The Wither in The Wither's Challenge. After climbing all the way up its tower and facing waves of its soldiers, you emerge from the hardest part of the Challenge to the top of the tower to find… that the items you've accumulated are strong enough that you can take its attacks without a problem and kill it by mashing the attack button for one minute at the most.
  • The final boss of Herobrine's Return is Herobrine himself. This battle has epic buildup and is definitely the peak of the map's presentation and effects, but from a gameplay standpoint… it's pretty simple. The first phase is basically a cutscene, the second is just fighting some not-particularly-tough minions that he throws at you a few at a time, and the third just has him rush at you to try and hit you. Just wail on him for half a minute or so and he's done.
  • Mystery Of The Pumpkin Castle is hard. Very hard. But by comparison, the fight with Jim Reaper is much easier. He just sits there on the wall and sends minions after you (tiny amounts of them compared to the legions you've been facing throughout the Castle) while you shoot his Hearts with little obstruction.
  • Wild West Adventure's final boss is a complete joke. Alonzo will sit on top of a pillar, not moving or attacking, while you fight his bandits. Even those aren't particularly hard, and you can easily reach the top of the pillar without having to fight any of them. Hit him once with the Sword Of The West and he dies instantly.
  • 241 has GLADOS. Yes, that GLADOS. No missiles here, though. You just push the Buttons that periodically show up on her, with the only danger being one-block-wide holes full of Lava that continuously open up in the floor, which are trivial to avoid.
  • Mysterious East has Empress Wuqing, who despite being responsible for every horrible thing that happens in the story, running the whole land, and being preceded by a very hard section… is actually kind of weak and doesn't take much to bring down. But she's not really the final boss…
  • Diversity: The Boss Battle Branch consists of an unmodified Wither fight. Qmagnet felt afterwards that this made the branch rather lackluster in comparison to the other branches, and the ideas he had in retrospective ended up being integrated into Diversity 2's Boss Battle Branch. Fortunately, the final bosses of both 2 and 3 are much more challenging and climactic.
• Awesome Bosses: While Minecraft maps aren't known for having super impressive bosses, there are a few that provide excellent fights.
  • Herobrine's Return has Koragor. After platforming your way through a section full of lava and fighting tough mobs, you come face-to-face with a fire giant who towers over you and challenges you to defeat him. He spews highly-damaging fireballs that force you to move around the arena quickly to avoid them, and hits a nice level of challenge once he starts summoning Blazes. Shoot the targets on his arms enough times, and his arms and head explode satisfyingly.
  • Diversity 2 has a Boss Battle branch like the first game. However, while the first Diversity had an underwhelming fight against a single Wither in a cage, its sequel instead has a gigantic Wither which attacks you from the background, firing explosives at you while you wait for it to leave itself open to attack, then fire arrows into its eyes. Hit it enough times, and its heads explode, spewing the blocks that make them up everywhere.
• Breather Boss:
  • Areita from Herobrine's Mansion takes less to kill than any of the other bosses and has relatively few dangerous attacks — she may be able to summon cave spiders, but those go down in a single hit, and the webs in her lair are pretty easy to play around. She's fought right in the middle of a very hard section.
  • Tarov is the easiest boss in Herobrine's Return (despite him being allegedly powerful, and killing Thannos earlier), as even after he transforms into a Wither, he has little health and no special abilities, and can be killed in seconds by blindly wailing on him with your sword. However, the part before his fight was quite difficult, and after him is the much harder final stretch of the map.
• Breather Level:
  • The Ice Tower in Four Towers is much shorter than the others, and has no enemies, only platforming challenges. There's also a safe spot at the bottom where you can resupply.
  • Tarov's tower in Herobrine's Return is much easier than the sections before or after it, being very short and having less enemies than any other area.
• Disappointing Last Level: Sadly a common problem that many maps have.
  • Four Towers get progressively worse as it goes on: The Bedrock and Obsidian Towers are fantastically designed and fiendishly difficult. The Ice Tower is much shorter and easier and focused on platforming instead of combat or puzzles, but is still fun. The Gold Tower isn't as interconnected to the rest of the map as the other Towers, and the fact that you have to backtrack through it to get the keys to the Central Fortress makes it feel kind of tacked on. Its also very short and bland and focused on solving obtuse puzzles (including one just to get into it). The Central Fortress itself, despite its awesome looking interior design, is virtually nonexistent as a level. Things really start to go downhill in Chapter 2, which feels completely unnecessarily tacked on to an already lengthy map, and trades in the labyrinthine enclosed spaces and emphasis on exploration of the rest of the map for larger but more linear stretches of identical terrain. The combat and puzzle solving is both easier and more boring in this section, and it just goes on for way too long. And the "epic" final battle? You run past some Zombies, up a hill, and hit a Lever.
  • The Wizard Burgmund's last section ditches the exploration and creepy atmosphere in favour of sending you along a linear path with no enemies to read a diary and blow up a Nether Portal, and then kill a bunch of enemies in a cave. The ending itself is horribly inconclusive and anticlimactic.
  • Its sequel The Return also suffers from this. Basically, you end up in a town where you have to visit several locations to either kill the Pigmen there or get some TNT so you can enter a Pigman Pod and blow it up. The problem is, it doesn't tell you where these locations are, so you'll spend most of your time wandering around looking for them. You'll also soon tire of doing the same things over and over again, even though blowing up the Pods is very satisfying. Oh, and rather than a satisfying final confrontation with Burgmund, you kill him in exactly the same way as all the other Pods.
  • The Pharaoh's Curse 2: The penultimate section, the Lost City Of Horobus, tries to do something different. While exploring an elaborately designed city looking for the Plot Coupons needed to progress while discovering secrets and collecting supplies to prepare for the final battle might seem like a good idea on paper, in practice it ends up being a mind-numbing collectathon where everything is hidden so well you're likely to give up and cheat out of sheer frustration and impatience. The very last area of the whole map isn't bad per se, but it's just way, way, way too hard.
  • The Mountain Of Kikatchu gets a nasty case of this. Most of the map is at least decent, but the final area, the Lost City Of Kikatchu, has no enemies, no traps, no puzzles, and no challenges of any kind. Instead, it's a vast maze of long identical corridors in pitch darkness. Since everywhere looks the same, it's easy to get lost (this is also where most of the bonus collectibles are, good luck finding them all), but even if you don't, wandering through a bunch of dark corridors for a while is hardly the most thrilling climax. Oh, and the ending? You get an incredibly confusing, nonsensical Info Dump about time travel and Hell and the Undead, and then you get a Last-Second Ending Choice: pull the Lever and blow up the Nether Portals, or don't. Ostensibly, this will determine something about peace in the future, but not only does the plot not make enough sense for you to care, but the map doesn't even care, since no matter what you do, it just dumps you in a random cave and says A Winner Is You.
  • Calmere Nightmare has the final Chapter: the Calmere Asylum. The area isn't necessarily bad, but it's entirely focused on combat rather than plot and horror, and it's really just a series of bland hallways (especially compared to the Nightmare sequences, where most of the previous combat was) full of random enemies. The ending makes up for it, though.
    • Calmere Nightmare 2 gets it much worse. The final Chapter is the Asylum again, and it's exactly the same. However, the final battle is a massive anticlimax, and the last bits of story delivers a Mind Screwdriver to the previous map that explains away most of the surreal psychological elements that made its story so unique.
  • Infernal Enigma was flawed overall, but it had its good parts. The last Quest is just a massive disappointment. Rather than any of the large and cool-looking environments and competent level design, the last Quest has you defeat the Forces Of Hell once and for all...by running through a big empty room with constantly spawning monsters, building a Nether Portal, going through it, and hitting a switch. That's it. Not even an ending.
  • Even a map as legendary as Deep Space Turtle Chase gets hit with this. The map's biggest strength was its GORGEOUS scenery and design, and well-made puzzles. The last area is a mining facility. Just an ordinary cave. And you're abruptly forced to complete a bunch of challenges that just come out of nowhere with no explanation, and are all incredibly frustrating (we can understand making the last level especially challenging, but jumping over Lava with a low ceiling? An invisible maze?), and the ending is an anticlimactic cliffhanger. Suffice to say the credits sequence was infinitely better made and more entertaining than what came before it.
  • The Curse Of The Pumpkin Prince has the Pumpkin Temple as its final level, which is very short and not very interesting. It's basically just a handful of short generic puzzles followed by a mad dash through an unnecessarily difficult gauntlet of monsters.
  • The Pumpkin Prince 2 starts to go downhill after you leave the other world, and especially after the temple. The surreal metahumour gets increasingly downplayed, and the journey gets padded out with pointless sidequests and overly hard areas that lack the creativity and charm of early level design. The final level in particular feels very rushed, as a final plot twist comes out of nowhere, a bunch of mooks get literally dropped on top of you, and you have to solve a glitchy broken puzzle before fighting a bland and fairly easy final boss.
  • The Tourist is a slow-paced map all about solving intricate puzzles while exploring a vast, lifeless setting full of beautiful but empty environments. How does it end? With a mad rush through an insanely hard obstacle course that you have to complete within an unfair time limit.
  • The EDEN Project was pretty good for most of it, but the last part is… not so good. You backtrack through the areas you've previously visited, but this time walking across them on a tiny bridge with more monsters than ever before, and if you fall off the map can be rendered Unwinnable. As the final "challenge" you're dropped into a small area that you have to scour every nook and cranny of to find the MacGuffin. When you do, A Winner Is You!
  • The Fall Of Gondolin is a particularly painful example, because the first two thirds of the map was so good. The last section after you escape from the city has none of the immense and beautiful scenery that defined the map, nor does it have any enemies or traps. Instead it has you navigating a confusing maze of giant canyons that all look the same and go on for SO LONG with no direction. And it all ends in what might be one of the worst cases of Anticlimax Boss not just in the history of Minecraft adventure maps, but in the history of video games in general.
  • The last area of Fallout is a giant ruined city that's a much more confined area than the open environments everywhere else. The place has few enemies or puzzles, and is mostly composed of wandering from building to building getting supplies and Plot Coupons.
  • Zombie Apocalypse was mostly pure awesome, but the last few areas are kind of disappointing. It starts when you reach the Industrial Sector, where instead of battle royales against hordes of Zombies, you mostly just wander around the empty streets and buildings, first looking for hidden switches and later just trying to slowly progress, and get slowly worn down by the steady stream of small groups of overpowered enemies and critical lack of supplies or shops. The last part is in the Nuclear Power Plant, which is just a rush of basic mooks and some gimmicky puzzles, with a very abrupt and unfulfilling ending.
  • After all the buildup, the ending of The Lost Potato 2 is basically the exact same thing as the ending of the first map. But whereas the first one had you entering a cool-looking castle and doing some platforming and puzzle solving before a genuinely well done twist cliffhanger, the Dungeon Of Dorleac is just a tiny corridor in a random mountain that you walk through and get teleported to a completely different location and stuck in a cage to get exposited to, in a painfully forced way of ending on a cliffhanger to prolong the story.
  • The last few puzzles of 241 are probably the weakest, as they're all very obtuse and frustrating, and highly prone to Game-Breaking Bugs. The last boss is piss easy, and the ending... doesn't exist.
• Goddamned Bats: Herobrine's Mansion has the black-capped skeletons found in the titular mansion. They have take a fair bit of damage to kill due to their strong armor, and their bows have extreme knockback, being able to send the player flying across the room with just a single hit. While it's normally beneficial to lure other monsters into getting hit by arrows, it's not a smart idea with these guys, since they can knock zombies behind you to surround you. What keeps them from being Demonic Spiders is their low attack power, meaning that they're not actually a threat by themselves.
• Goddamned Boss: The Queen Slime from Herobrine's Return. She's a Magma Cube with a huge size, boss-level HP, and strong armor, but doesn't come with any real support, so she's not offensively threatening despite her strong melee attacks. She also has no knockback resistance, so repeatedly hitting her with your sword can keep her knocked back and almost unable to attack. The end result is an easy, but very tedious Damage-Sponge Boss that consists of whaling on the Queen Slime for several minutes with your available weapons until she finally goes down. Fortunately, she's an Optional Boss, and when she splits upon death, the smaller Magma Cubes have normal HP.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the custom mobs faced in Diversity 3's Arena Branch is the "strider", which consists of a stray with a cave spider on its head (and a smoker, for some reason). Two major updates later and Minecraft actually has a mob called the strider, although it's nothing like the one here.
• That One Achievement: Certain maps have custom advancements, leading to the potential for this trope.
  • Diversity 3: More like Those Seven Advancements; specifically "Brainiac"^* complete the Trivia Branch with less than ten wrong answers, "Disciplined"^* complete the Parkour Branch without dying, "Ringmaster"^* complete a course in the Elytra Branch, hitting all rings in one go without using rockets, "Sky's the Limit"^*  a secret, reach the build limit height in the Elytra Branch, "Pizza Delivery"^* complete the Dropper Branch in thirty deaths or less, "Wildlife Protector"^* complete the Survival Branch without breaking any spawners, and "Hole in One"^* a secret, get a hole in one during the Secret Branch.
• That One Boss:
  • The final battle with Horobus in The Pharaoh's Curse 2. Your objective is to destroy the Resurrection Machine, which is represented by a Blaze Spawner. So you have to fight constantly spawning Blazes, already tough enemies, in a tiny room, while trying to destroy a Monster Spawner. And this is right after the hardest part of the map, so you're probably low on health, food, and items. Do you get any supplies? Nope! Have fun!
  • The unnamed boss at the end of the maze in The Pumpkin Prince 2. Unreasonable amounts of enemies are constantly spawning, and you have to fend them off while trying to hit a small target from far away during short windows of opportunity.
  • Zatho from Herobrine's Mansion can be a bit of a pain. He has unnecessarily large amounts of health, he can summon some fairly annoying minions, his attacks can set you on Fire and Wither you, and he can inflict Blindness, an ability which he uses constantly.
  • The final boss fight of Wrath Of The Fallen is hard mainly due to its sheer length, and the massive amount of fighting you have to do. The worst parts have got to be the Nightmare World sections, where you have to shoot multiple far away targets that require incredibly good aim while being mauled by some of the strongest monsters around (including Zombie Pigmen, Ghasts, and Withers. Yes, multiple Withers).
  • In Herobrine's Return, Koragor is a strong contender, as his weak points are quite hard to hit, and they regenerate if you don't hit the rest on that side quickly enough. His attacks are very poweful and you have to move really fast to avoid them, and there's Lava all around you for them to knock you into. The good thing is you respawn very close if you die.
• That One Level:
  • The tower in The Wizard Burgmund is a labyrinthine nightmare of identical twisting corridors full of loops and dead ends, with no indication of where you're supposed to go.
  • The ship in The Pharaoh's Curse 2 has way to many enemies for its own good, which you have to fight in tight spaces, and they just keep coming. And in order to complete the area, you're forced to take a probably-lethal amount of damage.
    • The Lost City Of Horobus is a huge open area that you have to scour every nook and cranny of in order to find Signs to give you clues. Not only is this difficult and time-wasting, it's just boring.
    • The pyramid, which comes right after it, is absolutely overflowing with monsters who are constantly swarming over you with no breaks and no supplies. You're given a choice of two paths: fighting monsters while platforming or fighting monsters while navigating a maze, pick your poison.
  • The caves in the second-to-last Quest of Infernal Enigma are full of monsters and have an extremely confusing layout, giving you no clue where you're supposed to go. You can waste a lot of time looking for the exit, and if/when you do, reaching it requires some very frustrating platforming.
  • The Temple from The Pumpkin Prince 2 requires you to get through 3 themed sections, all of which have some manner of very difficult challenge.
    • The maze too. It's huge, confusing, and full of monsters, and ends in a very tricky boss battle.
  • The Tourist's final area, Hell, lives up to its reputation. It's a race through a very long deadly obstacle course with no room for error due to the very tight time limit. Keep in mind that this is supposed to be a puzzle map.
  • The hardest part of Pyramid Adventure is either the timed lava maze or the platforming puzzle over tiny fences.
  • The whole Industrial Sector in Zombie Apocalypse is very long and tedious, and filled with tough enemies and switches that are hard to find. There are no supply points in the Sector or for a while before it, so you'll be running low on vital supplies before long.
  • Stage 4 of The Wither's Challenge is harder than any of the others. All the enemies are very tough and most are quite fast, and the arena you fight them in has far more difficult terrain than the others, featuring Fences and Cobwebs among other things.
  • Diversity 2 has the Parkour branch’s “Speed” challenge, which is even harder than the “Rage” course. You have to go through a Battletoads-esque obstacle course full of lava and cactuses while affected with a high level of Speed, making it hard to react in time. Unless you’re going forward at top speed the whole time, the effect will end before you can use it to make the final jump and complete the course.
• That One Puzzle:
  • The puzzles from the Trial Of Mind in Professor Grizwald And The Redstone Keys where you have to arrange Wool on the wall patterns in specific arrangements. It requires you to remember unintuitive clues and careful thought about each block, and you have to do it over and over again.
  • The torch game in The Tourist is completely different from any other puzzle in the game, and requires a lot of careful thought and strategy. You're going to be retrying it a lot.
  • The reactor puzzle in Gloria is pretty confusing. You have to fool around with switches and redirecting water, but you're given almost no clue what to do and the process is very complicated.
  • One of the puzzles in Diversity 2's Escape branch has a secret code that can only be revealed by finding very well-hidden switches hidden in two giant rooms full of skulls.
  • Diversity 3:
    • The purple puzzle room can only be cleared by drawing specific patterns on the floor, but finding out what the patterns even are is a major Guide Dang It! if you aren't careful to look all across the room while you're on the drawing surfaces. Unless you have a very good memory, you'll likely have to take screenshots for reference.
    • The green puzzle room, featuring the kind of puzzle where you must change all the buttons from off to on, and each button press changes the buttons around it. Fortunately, if you're really struggling, the game will eventually take pity on you, with an Ender Crystal descending to offer hints.
    • The brown puzzle room challenges you to place a selection of items inside hoppers, based on the sounds they make. Not too bad, until you have to figure out which music disc plays which song...
• That One Sidequest: In Mysterious East, the optional part where you go into the burning Okiya to retrieve Hatsumomo's possessions is… difficult. As if navigating a burning building wasn't hard enough, there's also large numbers of enemies (and the last room has an unnecessarily large number of monsters, up to and including Blazes), and you don't have very good weapons or armour by this point.