Nightmare Fuel Boss

Uh, I'm having a little difficulty creating a Nightmare Fuel boss for a personal project. You know, something that looks like Giygas or Uboa. Unfortunately, my mind is not twisted enough to think of anything. Anyone have any suggestions, or ideas? Thanks in advance.

Why don't you give us some explanation of the story/setting/etc.?

I think that a small childish girl could make a terrifying boss. Especially if she was in a sailor suit outfit and dual-wielding meat cleavers and was a Lightning Bruiser. And every time she cuts you she laughs like a schoolgirl, licks the blood off the blade, then says it reminds her of strawberry jam...

Well... its a nice happy game most of the time, set on a world similar to a Kirby game, except it's an RPG. But when you reach the end, all that happiness just dissipates, and you fight the ultimate evil which will be a very disturbing Eldritch Abomination. And I'm at my wit's end trying to think up something good.

Make the boss an angel. Not one of those pretty androgynous ones with wings on their backs, I mean one of those Eldritch Abomination ones that are described in the Old Testament.

edited 14th Feb '10 1:11:26 PM by Nexus

I guess I should mention that the characters are also similar in style of the Kirby characters. I forgot to add that detail...

fifty-foot tall clown with smaller clowns growing out of it, with even smaller clowns growing out of them. It fires random sprites at you (if you're using sprites) and when you take damage, one of the small clowns turns into an image of yourself. It also makes the Most Annoying Sound whenever it fires.

The main character, eyes, mouth and ears stitched tight while bleeding.

...stitches are freaky.

Oh yeah, having junk like stitched mouths and button eyes freak the hell out of me (had this nightmare once too... :shiver: Scary stuff!) . Or, a seemingly normal friendly person/creature suddenly warping into something that came out of something like Blood+, like suddenly huge elongated arms with claws and scary face and stuff. I dunno'. Scared the crap out of me in my dream XD . Especially when it reached out its monstrous arms and started squeezing me to death!

<3 ali

A four-armed, four-legged being with an upside-down masked head with an eye at the top that occasionally opens and looks around the room rapidly before closing again. It's jaw should come unhinged when it smiles. It should walk on what should be its hands and use its legs, which are backwards, to attack. Pulsating veins, chains, stitched wounds, eyes and mouths that are in places that they don't belong, and limbs that are completely separate from the body are always nice touches.

Outside of that, the most frightening forms are those that take something familiar and comforting and pervert them. This is why monsters built off children can be incredibly freaky. Distort the human form into something that's recognizable as human but noticeably inhuman as well.

edited 14th Feb '10 3:05:14 PM by Miijhal

Don't forget the demonic batwings with both kinds of tentacles coming out of various points on them.

Also have the "hands" really be made of scythe like claws that rend flesh as easily as a cleaver cuts a side of steak.

kirby... so like a giant dark cloud with a single disgusting eye in its center, that opens up its hideous maw bla bla bla.

You could try having a little girl without a face. Something like my avatar, perhaps.

Maybe some kind of Body Horror, or make the boss an angel in the way the Bible describes them.

How about something that is, in essence, the primordial essence of all evil in this story's universe? Something that is so fundamentally necessary for the foundation of all reality; i.e. Good cannot exist without Evil? In a nod to Giygas and Jedah's stage in whatever Darkstalkers game it is that he appears in, why not make it something like a gigantic demon fetus?

The protagonists could travel through this Hellish netherworld in order to find this, the ultimate evil, without even realisin that they're quite literally travelling through the womb of Hell itself. When they finally reach the final boss, it could appear as some sort of Eldritch Abomination made up of thousands and thousands of staring eyes, gaping maws and stretching hands emerging from a black void (sort of like The Gate from Full Metal Alchemist, let's say, for reference). This slowly begins to take on a somewhat more coherent form, as the baby's body becomes more human-like in its mother's womb, until finally it becomes something that looks disturbingly like a Lovecraftian fetus - you know, huge, repulsive, covered in fangs and eyes and claws and mouths where they don't belong. As it takes damage, its eyes could slowly open up, until finally one huge eye in the centre of its torso opens up and emerges on a toothed tentacle; the heroes then kill the tentacle, symbolising the cutting of the umbilical cord, and the demon-fetus screams an unearthly cry and slowly dies, crumbling away into nothingness as the eyeball expands, getting bigger and bigger. It could then utter something eerie and cryptic, then explode in a spray of blood.

Bonus points if the body slowly and subtly emerges from the dark void/wall behind it, so while the player/viewer is busy hammering away at its HP/watching someone hammer away at its HP, they barely notice it's emerging, and by the time they do, they just have an epic-level freakout.

Am I thinking too much into this? Or not enough?

How about this:

Normal. A completely average, stereotypical, unassuming middle-aged man. He speaks slowly and calmly. He never gets angry. He's never upset to any extreme degree and he never raises his voice. He has a wife and a kid and is very active in the child's school life.

Yet he's the one that dismembers people with piano wire while whistling merrily.

That's Nightmare Fuel. The idea that any person you know could just...SNAP.

But...that wouldn't work, would it?

how about at first the weakest enemy in the game after you kill it it grows huge all of a sudden and takes form of ur characters with you then after they all die and it posses your mind. when you fight it from the inside it becomes a gient fetus thingy.the more you hurt it the more damage you get.not finished

then it turns out the baby is you and u make a heroic sacrifice to erase yourself from egsistence nobody will remember you after fight.and your best dead friend takes your place and u live.

I've been thinking about a suitably creepy videogame boss too, for a hypotethical game set in one of the settings I've come up with.

One I came up with is the Ancient Void Stalker (Void Stalker being a powerful monster in the same setting, the boss being an even bigger and nastier version). Basically it looks a little like a dragon of some kind, exept without wings or eyes, and it's head looks more like a carnivorous dinosaur's instead of the typical dragon head. Oh, and it also has no skin, with it's muscles (coloured black instead of red) and bones visible, and contantly bleeding black ichor. It hangs upside down from the air, as if holding onto an invisible ceiling, and moves in a very jerky, almost stop-motion kinda way.

The other is the Herald's true form, which is not really a physical being at all, but hundreds of red eyes staring from the Void (dunno how one would fight that tho).

Try something freudrian. Babies, despite apperance, are good nighmare-fuel.

Make it look like a dismaberd corpse, maybe? with intestines for tenticles? edit: As metioned brefore me, having the human body distorted in horrifc ways is good nighmare fuel.

Or maybe some constant ear-rapeing chanting. Like intoning the names of all it encounters?

Some sort of semi-organic, semi-metal mass of tumors and pain?

Somthing creepy in action and deed?

Or rather than adding stuff untill somthing is creepy, take stuff AWAY...

perhaps a better idea. What scares you, and how could you represent that in allegory ?

edited 13th Nov '10 3:28:13 AM by doorhandle

edited 23rd Nov '10 7:52:00 AM by Counterclock

Maybe you should try less on making a grotseque boss and more on where the boss battles setting. Like what if the boss fight takes place in a ordinary house.

LIKE THE ONE THE ONE YOU LIVE IN!

The whole setting sounds like a Lotus-Eater Machine to me. Maybe the final boss is the Puppet Master who build this world and is trying, for reasons our little brains can't fully understand, to keep the protagonists there... Forever. Think of Maromi: it wants so badly to make people happy that it's willing to entomb them in a fantasy. It would make for a good Shut Up Cthulu moment.

As for physical appearance, Lovecraft will always be the trendsetter for brain-breaking monstrosities. Tentacles, pulsing flesh, and eyes where they shouldn't be. ...This is starting to sound a lot like End of Evangelion.

Interface Screw Interface Screw Interface Screw.

Indeed. Maybe have the entire screen be bleached a sort of red whenever the creature roars?

A reverse cyborg