Marathon Boss

It's so long, you can take a break in the middle of this fight without issue.

"[W]here do you get off being so impossible anyway? We spent more than half the game fighting you."

— Problem Sleuth

Some bosses can be taken out pretty fast. Not these. For these, well, you'd best make sure your schedule is clear for the day.

A boss fight which requires a significant amount of time to defeat. Can be related to Sequential Boss, as while one part of the boss isn't long, all the parts together are. Or it may simply be an extreme case of a Damage-Sponge Boss. God help you if it's both. Has a good chance of happening with Final and superbosses. See the Marathon Level for the level version of this, which may well have a Marathon Boss at the end.

These bosses frequently elicit cries of "Why Won't You Die?!" among players (especially if there is no indication of how much health it has left). Executed poorly, it's a Goddamned Boss with possible Padded Sumo Gameplay. Executed well, it's an epic and awesome boss that will keep your blood pumping. Contrast with Rush Boss, this trope's inverse. If you were looking for a Boss Marathon, that's a Boss Bonanza. Is often synonymous with the term "Raid Boss", which may be purposefully designed to be far too powerful for a singular player to fight, and instead requires an army of players to mitigate damage output and input.

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Examples:

A - D

• Abomi Nation: The Final Boss, Awakened Furcifume, has absolutely massive HP and MP totals, dwarfing those of any other Abomi. (Naturally, this is the one Abomi you can't recruit for your own team, even under Total Chaos randomization.) In practice, though, he's not much longer than other boss fights, as you only need to defeat him instead of a whole team. Percent Damage Attacks also work, which can really help clean his clock.
• Ace Attorney:
  • In a rare Visual Novel example, the first Ace Attorney Investigations has the final confrontation against Quercus Alba. To put it bluntly, the entire first chapter doesn't even come close to the amount of time you'll spend watching him shoot down every single piece of evidence you have against him. The fact that there's even a save point in the middle of it says it all. This is lampshaded by the characters themselves when they note how much of a Determinator this guy is — he simply will. Not. Give. Up.
  • While certainly not as long as Alba, Acro of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All takes an unusually long time for a witness, taking up a whole trial day for his testimonies, a rarity for the series. Like Alba, there's a save point in the middle of it.
  • Eggert Benedict/Ashley Graydon from The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures is no slouch in this department, taking up the entirety of the later half of the final cases' 4-part trial to defeat.
• Amaltea, the Guild Quest boss from Arc Rise Fantasia: High HP, multiple layers of defense against magic, physical, and Excels (single, Trinity Acts, and Excel Trinities).
• Parodied (like every other video game trope) in The Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation with Sir Werepire. First he's a vampire, then a vampire werewolf, then a vampire werewolf knight, then his health bar refills and he comes back as a vampire werewolf knight ghost, and then he comes back as a vampire werewolf knight zombie. The Nerd loses his temper and just tells Sir Werepire to go away, which he complies with:
  Nerd: NO! THAT'S ENOUGH! FUCK YOU! THIS IS RIDICULOUS! STOP! Fuckin' Zombie Ghost Vampire Knight Werewolf... WE'RE DONE. FUCK OFF. ...Asshole.
• Asura's Wrath: Counting the cutscenes, the final boss fight with Chakravartin lasts a full hour.
• Although most levels in The Battle Cats are fairly short, usually only taking 5-10 minutes to beat at worst, it has some bosses that fall into this:
  • Absolute Defense has the Crazed Tank Cat, who has 3,200,000 health and the range and attack power to back it up. Making matters worse are the mooks that support the boss, most notably Duches; who can tank one Bahamut Cat attack and Owlbrows; who have decent range and attack to plow the way for the Crazed Tank to wreck havoc on your army. It can take up to 20 minutes to finish the level.
  • Flappy Cat is one for the Crazed Cat stages. The Crazed Bird Cat's combination of long range, high health and attack, and being Immune to Flinching makes significantly damaging it difficult, forcing the player to slowly wear it down while contending with the Demonic Spiders that support it. Level-appropriate Cats can take up to half an hour to beat it. Later on, the upgraded Forest Beasts is even worse — due to the Manic Flying Cat's much higher stats, longer range, and stronger support, beating it can take up to 45 minutes.
  • For the Madoka Magica collaboration, there is Homulilly, the Nutcracker Witch. Even if you have the required cats and have them be strong enough to tank the witch’s super long-ranged attacks and take down the tough Mooks, it can take up to half an hour to beat without using the collab Uber Rares and the Cat Combo that boosts their effectiveness against the collab enemies.
• Bayonetta series:
  • Jubileus, the final boss of the first Bayonetta. You fight her for a while and take away a bit of health, then avoid fire balls in a lava field, then ice balls in an ice field, then thunder balls in the middle of a freaking hurricane, then fight her directly again for a while, then bond her with your hair and take away the last of her health, then punch her from Pluto to the sun while avoiding to crash her into a planet. And finally you have to destroy what remains of her body. The whole process will take a good ten minutes even for the best players, and likely twice as much the first time.
  • Bayonetta 3: Singularity can take around half an hour in total. He has three different forms, each of which being a long fight in of itself, and goes through a large multitude of phases. Bayonetta even runs through a host of help across the entire battle, ranging from two super-summoned demons, Jeanne, the absorbed alternate Bayonettas, two surviving alternate Bayonettas based on her appearances from the prior two games, Luka, Viola, before Singularity is finally done in by a laser blast from Gomorrah.
• The Binding of Isaac Rebirth:
  • The game has a relative example in its True Final Boss, Mega Satan. Most bosses in this game go down in 30 seconds to a minute in an average run. Due to the way the fight is set up, unless you have a very specific item (Chaos Card, which will skip all but the last part of the fight), the fight will take four to five minutes with a good run.
  • The Afterbirth DLC adds Hush, who can be fought by defeating It Lives in under 30 minutes. Before the fight, you gain access to 4 chests, 2 item rooms, and a shop. The boss, however, gets up to 95% damage resistance based on how much damage you did within the past few seconds. On top of that, it has more health than Mega Satan. Good luck as The Lost or Keeper... Thankfully, like the above boss, you can use the Chaos Card on it.
  • A similar example is the Final Boss of Greed Mode, Ultra Greed, who, like Hush, has a damage resistance mechanic. Combine this with the fact that he can summon minions and heal himself, and you're in for a long fight. Thankfully, using the Chaos Card will kill him instantly, and touching him with Midas Touch will turn him into a golden statue, removing his damage scaling. The fight is even longer in Greedier Mode, which turns him into a Sequential Boss.
  • The Afterbirth+ DLC adds Delirium, who has even more health than the above boss and makes up for lacking the damage reduction mechanic by teleporting all over the goddamn place and occasionally taking forms that are much smaller, and more difficult to hit, ensuring most of your shots simply won't land. It's also the only enemy in the game that's immune to the Chaos Card^note It isn't immune to Plan C, but it only works with Lazarus and his revive mechanic due to its long death animation though, so you can't cheap out the fight either.^note Due to how the game works, it's entirely possible to kill it within seconds on an extremely good run, though it's a Luck-Based Mission.
  • Finally, Repentance adds THE BEAST, who has the same health as Delirium, and is the final boss of the Boss Bonanza of the Home floor.
• The final battle of Blazing Chrome has several phases with platforming sequences sandwiched between them.
• May God help you if you fight the Final Boss of Borderlands on Playthrough 2 Solo. If so, be prepared to spend about 15-20 minutes unloading all of your weapons into its weakpoint while being flung back by its shockwave and laser attacks. Oh, and if you die, its health fully regenerates. Ditto General Knoxx on Playthough 2.5. Not only can he easily kill in a single attack if you are not being careful, but he has Devastators in both Normal and Badass forms, as well as Lance Medics who can heal about 5 minutes' worth of damage in 10 SECONDS.
• Borderlands 2:
  • The game has BNK3R (pronounced "Bunker"), a giant, flying robot with a monumental amount of health. There is an ammo-vending machine located near the area where Bunker is fought, and you will need it. However, Zero (the character) players who invest in B0re can make laughably short work of it due to its multitude of aligned critical hit points, where one well placed shot can reduce its health to 1 in seconds, but it won't die because it needs to go through a second form where it deploys its cannon and align itself to deploy the loot before you can kill it. This exploit can get to the extent where the game may suffer performance issues trying to process the amount of critical hits being scored in such a short time.
  • There's also The Warrior, the game's final boss, which resembles a giant angry demon-dog with fire breath. This time, you can't run back and forth to a vending machine.
  • The raid bosses. If you thought the Warrior was hard, think about a monster specifically designed to be taken on by a team. Extremely powerful attacks and a crap ton of health — if its name ends with "the Invincible" and you're alone, run.
  • One Final Fantasy-worthy raid boss in particular, Dexiduous The Invincible, has over 13-and-a-half Billion health, by far the most of any enemy in the game. While this sounds ridiculous, do note that at that point character builds worth even half their salt will be dealing damage ranging from the hundred-thousands to the millions per shot.
  • The mini-DLC The Horrible Hunger of the Ravenous Wattle Gobbler has an ingenious parody. The Wattle Gobbler itself is a fairly mild boss, but afterwards quest-giver Mr. Torgue has one more thing for you: Say hi to his grandmother. Fitting the Thanksgiving theme, you are given two "missions" to patiently and politely listen to Grandma Flexington's stories. You can't walk away, and you have to give the right answers when she checks that you're paying attention. The second, "Raid Difficulty", is a full twenty minutes of doing nothing but listen (except for a brief fetch quest in the middle just to keep you on your toes).
• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!:
  • Shadow Trap isthe final boss in the Claptastic Voyage DLC. He has an ungodly amount of health and it takes a ridiculously long time just to get rid of his shields, it can easily take anywhere from 30-45 minutes to defeat him in your first playthrough, and potentially over an hour in True Vault Hunter Mode.
  • The final boss of the base game, The Sentinel, has three separate phases that require depleting it's considerable shield bar, after which it disappears and transforms into another elemental form. After you do this three times, it warps back in with one final transformation where you now have to deplete its even larger health bar. Once you do this, you'd think it's over, but out of the ground comes The Empyrean Sentinel. You now have to fight an even larger, nastier boss with three more forms, each of which has health and shield of 2-3 phases of the previous boss. While it's a nice, big target, it's also only vulnerable on one specific spot each phase. Overall, killing both forms of the final boss can easily take longer than killing the final bosses of the first two games in the series combined.
• In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, the final battle with Arianna can last for quite a while. Her four phases put together have a whopping total of 750,000 HP. To put things in perspective, most of the other endgame bosses have about 100,000. The only enemy with more health is Esoteraphim, a nigh-impossible Easter Egg boss that wasn’t even put in the game until several months after release. For his part, Esoteraphim has 790,000 HP, but you’ll barely ever get to attack him, since he enforces a frantic Healing Loop by automatically K.O.ing one of your characters every other turn (in addition to his regular attacks), meaning the fight can last for literally hours with very little progress being made. (And for extra fun, when his health finally hits 50%, he gains the ability to heal.)
• Brave Dungeon's bosses have high Hp, but Zizou, the game's secret boss takes the cake and eats it with her whopping 3500000 Hp.
• Tyr/Myria from Breath of Fire. Then again, you should have known after the previous bosses that after the health bar you actually see is only a fraction of their actual health.
• There's a Match-Three Game example, too. Normally when clearing the top of the screen in Bubble Witch Saga, you're given a congratulatory message, but the first time you do so on level 166, you get the message, "The Lord of Shadows is gathering his strength..." and are taken to another screen. It turns out to be a three-stage level, at the end of which one of his five heads explodes, meaning four more three-stage levels before he's defeated.
• The final boss battle in Child of Eden has about five forms and can take over 10 minutes to complete; witness it in all its glory here.
• City of Heroes and City of Villains mostly avoids this, but the old version of Hamidon could take three hours even with a large raid and smart players. After Hamidon got a rework, people had gotten him down in 15 minutes.
  • The last mission of the Imperious Task Force can go this way, with the Nictus-infused Romulus having three 'pet' Nictus Essences that deliver additional damage, one of whom also has an area-of-effect heal (on top of Romulus' own impressive healing rate) whose effect increases for each player character within a fairly long radius, often making this fight a protracted and painful process.
  • Reichsman from the Dr. Khan Task Force didn't take as long as Romulus but it was close. He didn't have any particularly special powers but he had a lot of hit points (about 10x the normal for an Archvillain of his level) and since regeneration scaled with hit point total out-damaging his regeneration required pretty good damage. Of course having a character with a strong regeneration debuff along made the fight a lot easier but a lower damage team without any regeneration debuffs was in for a major grind.
• Lord Burroughs from Clock Tower 3. First of all, he has two health bars while the other bosses only have one. Each health bar takes twice the damage of a normal boss. He has two main attacks; a tether ball projectile similar to yours, and a pool of red slime that traps the player for a few seconds, leaving them open to projectiles. He does have a sword, though he only uses it at close range. What makes this boss a pain in the ass is that when he tethers you with three balls, he does an instant-kill attack. These can be dodged by crouching, but using this strategy drags on the fight for more than half an hour.
• Hot Limit and other "long version" songs in DanceDanceRevolution: 5th Mix.
  • Or you know This. Not only clocking in at seven minutes (while the average DDR song is under two,) it also has in the neighborhood of 2000 steps, meaning you can get multiple 300+ combos in a single song (where as 300 is about typical for one song on the highest DDR difficulty.) Granted, you have to find and download the song for yourself to run in Stepmania, but some of us go out of our way to run (nearly literal) marathons.
  • Special mention goes the Challenge courses in the US release of DDRMAX. In most games, this mode makes you do 4 songs in a row without stopping and little room for error. This game, on the other hand, makes you do 24 songs in a row without missing more than 3 steps total. On top of that, they're HARD songs.
• Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising:
  • The final boss has 3 million HP and can regenerate about 200 000 at a time. Your units can deal 1000-2000 damage at best. Kind of justified, since he's a Greater Daemon of Nurgle, and those are said to be able to destroy whole planets alone.
  • Also the Avatar in the base game, who requires thirty or forty minutes of beating on and running away to take down because he'll kill your entire force if you just sit around hitting him.
• The final boss of The Denpa Men. It's basically three boss fights against the Rook, Queen and King without being allowed to heal or change equipment. While the Rook can be basically beat by barraging it with physical attacks, the Queen can use a guard shield to defend itself, and uses some more damaging attacks. They're both easy compared to the King. He has tons of HP and regains some HP at the end of every turn, he attacks twice in one turn, he can easily sweep your entire party, he can use guard shields to completely neutralize damage, he flip-flops from being completely invulnerable to magic and being invulnerable to physical attacks (while still being fairly strong against magic), and, near the end of the fight, he flat-out becomes invincible for a few turns, and there's nothing to do but wait it out. Yikes. The whole sequence of fights can go on for nearly an hour if you're unlucky. They even make their return in the sequels as post-game bosses and are just as hard. The third game even has you fight all three of them at once.
  • The Denpa Men: Beyond the Waves's final boss isn't any easier. Thought the Evil Witch has no other forms, she hits hard with several different elements. This will take you some time if you're prepared and even more so if you're not using equipment to strike at her various weaknesses. Her second fight in the Inferno (as Demon Queen) is the same and is only made slightly shorter because all her phases are also weak to Light.
  • The Denpa Men: Rise of Digitoll's Master Squelch/Self Made King is one of these by virtue of his high HP count, hard hitting attacks and having Master Squelch transform into Self Made King (aka King of Evil) halfway through the fight. Even if you can strike him down with Light, he'll take a bit to go down.
• The level 7 boss and the Final Boss of the original Descent both took absurd amounts of damage before dying and would take you from full health to nearly dead with one missile. In fact, if you don't apply a patch, the final boss is actually invincible on all but the two easiest difficulty levels, making the game Unwinnable. Said patch also makes the level 7 boss die much more quickly.
• Destiny 2: The Ghost of the Deep Dungeon bosses Ecthar and Šimmumah ur-Nokru both have larger health pools than most raid bosses. The last boss Šimmumah ur-Nokru especially has a lot of health. Even with 3 people it can take around 2 to 3 damage cycles to fully kill. If you are doing it by yourself, it can take far more damage cycles. All the while Nokru can summon lucent moths that can quickly burst you down and you are in a room full of enemies. Even after killing Nokru (and Ecthar), the encounter doesn't end until you crush the ghost.
• Devil Survivor:
  • Belberith is pretty nasty, forcing you to walk all over the map before you can hurt him (unless you can fly or warp across gaps in the stages), all the while attacking you and summoning enemies. And when you finally get in range to hurt him he has tonnes of HP, nasty resistances, and regeneration.
  • And he pales in comparison to Babel, the final boss. If you're playing Amane or Naoya's path it merely involves taking down a boss while enemies are spawning, taking out all of the Bels, including Belberith, and then killing the supremely nasty Babel. If you're on Gin or Atsuro's path it's longer and even nastier (though not including the Bels). Especially Atsuro's.
  • On Gin's path, you lose your demons, ALL of your demons, before going up against Babel's final form. This is annoying on your first playthrough, but your characters would probably be roughly on par with your demons so it wouldn't be THAT bad if you prepared for it. However, if you're not aware of how the fight works and are on your third or fourth playthrough, during which you probably completely relied on the end-game demons you carried over from each game, it's a good chance you'll lose due to being underleveled. Now, while the story hints at this, it's easy to assume you'd lose your demons AFTER Babel dies. Nope.
• Diablo himself in Diablo II, who not only has a ton of HP, but most certainly is a threat. You'll spend a lot of time attacking and a lot of time dying.
• Digital Devil Saga: While he doesn't take as long as some of these other examples, the Demi-Fiend himself takes around at least 30 minutes to beat. It doesn't help that he is extremely difficult where, if you are unlucky, you can wipe at any time (and not from Gaea Rage). Notably, the fight still takes this long in an optimized speedrun.
• Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness took this trope to its logical extreme with its version of Tyrant Overlord Baal. The fight can easily takes over 30 minutes. To run it down:
  • You can only fight him in Rasetsu Mode, which adds a digit onto each of the stats. Let that sink in before you read on.
  • He has 100 Billion HP at default, and six separate forms with the same amount of HP. At max stars with Land of Carnage active, he goes up to 400 Billion HP in each form.
  • His battle stats start off around 500 Million each.
  • His equipment cannot be stolen.
  • He has an advanced version of Pringer X's Special Skill Solved, where even normal attacks can be nullified after the first use. This sticks throughout the fight.
  • Each form has a different Evility to contend with: Form 1 can attack your characters the instant they deploy from the Base Panel, Form 2 inflicts every status ailment at the end of every turn, Form 3 gains a 50% evasion bonus, Form 4 has Baal summon two small copies of himself per turn, Form 5 outright deals physical / magical damage per turn, and Form 6 will destroy the Base Panel and begin regenerating 20% HP/SP per turn.
  • Your reward for managing to take this abomination down? The Warp Engine, better known as Disgaea 1's Hyperdrive, which Baal himself was using during the fight against you. It has nice stats, and its unique Innocent means moving doesn't reset your standing combo bonus, combining this with Infinite Movement.
• The final boss of the arcade game Dolphin Blue. Every time you think the fight is over, his machine just reconfigures itself.
• King K. Rool in Donkey Kong 64 is particularly infamous for this. A five-phase long fight that lasts about 15 minutes and has no checkpoints. The precise timing required to beat his final phase means that it's very likely to lose right at the end and have to start all over again.
• Since the .hack// games try to emulate an MMO, they had to include a couple of these bosses. For instance: most of the Phases, in particular Macha, Corbenik (both from Volume 4), and Skeith (from Volume 1), the last of which is the hardest boss in the series, and especially the final Cubia fight, in which you fight your way through three of his "Cores", with each having more health than the last. Then you get to fight Cubia proper... and he fully regenerates his health once you kill him. So you get to kill him again... and then he regenerates again, at which point the plot takes over and he's killed in a different way.
• Bosses in the arcade version of Double Dragon II are in general much tougher than the first game, but Abore, the Terminator Impersonator in Mission 2 , takes the cake. It doesn't help that you fight two of him in the final stage.
• The Arishok in Dragon Age II has an extra long health bar, high defense, and also uses health potions. On top of that, his swings are very hard hitting, enough to knock you down each time unless you have high fortitude or are immune to knockdown. And he can get you into an infinite knockdown chain, meaning you're potentially done if he hits you even once. He's way easier if you opt to face him along with his goons, because at least then you have a party helping you.
• Dragon Ball Z: Gokuu Gekitouden has Frieza as this, of the series of somewhat smaller fights variety. His first form has 200,000 life, and each form after that has even more. The basic outline of the fight is: You fight Freeza's first form (200,000 life) using Gohan, Krillin, and Vegeta. Then when you beat him he transforms into his second form, which has 300,000 life and you continue to fight him until Piccolo shows up. Then Piccolo goes one-on-one with Freeza's second form and when Freeza loses again he transforms into his third form, which has 350,000 life. Once Freeza has transformed into his third form Vegeta, Gohan and Krillin join in to help Piccolo, and once Freeza loses AGAIN he transforms into his final form, which has 400,000 life, and you fight him until Goku arrives. Then Goku goes one-on-one with final form Freeza and drops a Spirit Bomb on him when you win. And then, if you meet the requirements for the True Ending, Goku goes Super Saiyan and fights 100% Final Form Freeza. Twice. This whole sequence of bossfights takes no less than three hours. And you can't pause during battle. Fortunately the game is generous enough to allow you to save in the middle of this series of bossfights, once when Piccolo arrives and again when Goku arrives.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest VIII features a Final Boss where before you could even attack, you had to use a special item seven times by all four party members. Moreover, you're being attacked the whole time, and have to heal every other turn. Then comes the absurdly large health meter — and this boss has a habit of healing himself regularly, stretching it out even further.
  • Dragon Quest IV: Necrosaro/Psaro the Manslayer/Death Psaro refuses to die. He will transform six times for a whopping seven forms. His fourth form, the one where he finally gets serious, has the most HP and he constantly spams a healing technique. The final fight can be boiled down to whether he runs out of HP before your healers run out of MP. And in the original NES version, where you're stuck with AI control for everyone except the main character, luck is an even bigger factor than usual for boss fights. As in, "will I luck out and have my healers actually heal when I need them to?"
• Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project has pretty normal boss fights, with one exception: The Superboss, Wozma. It's an immobile green sphere with about ten times as much health as any other boss in the game and takes a good 15-30 minutes of jumping up and firing rockets at it to kill it. It's pretty well-hidden, requiring you to find all the nukes on Hard difficulty and then take a special path that's only unlocked after you've got them all. Unfortunately, your only reward for beating it is an icon on your saved game.
• Dungeon Siege II has a number of these bosses: with the black mage battles, you must destroy 3 crystal prisms that form an impenetrable shield around the boss before you can do any damage; you are then allowed to take away about a sixteenth of their health before the crystal prisms return.

E - F

• Elden Ring:
  • The Fire Giant has a whopping 43,623 HP. Already this is an intimidating amount of HP, one of the highest in the game, but it gets worse when you factor in that he takes reduced damage everywhere but his weak point, his injured ankle. The uneven terrain makes it hard to hit said ankle sometimes, and he has an annoying habit of rolling away to get distance on you. Then, when you get him down to half health, he begins his second phase by ripping off his leg, depriving you of the weak point you've been hitting. His new weak points in this phase are his hands, head, and the giant eye on his chest, and of those three his hands are the easiest to hit. Except he's usually trying to flatten you with them, so it's usually best to just keep hitting his remaining leg and deal reduced damage. Plus, he rolls away even more often now! Combine this with his fire attacks often forcing you to run away, and you’ll be here for a while. At least this is one of the rare bosses where you have access to your horse.
  • The Final Boss. Radagon, isn’t this, but unfortunately it is attached to the Elden Beast fight. Combined, they have less HP than the Fire Giant, but unlike the Fire Giant both of them are immune to Bleed, which deals percentage based damage and can speed up any fight tremendously. Radagon can be afflicted with other statuses, but the Elden Beast is immune to all of them. While Radagon is a traditional-ish 1-on-1 duel fight, Elden Beast, on top of having most of the HP, generally consists of him teleporting away while he fires magic at you that forces you to be on the defensive. Unlike the Fire Giant, you do not get Torrent during the fight, meaning you will spend more time simply running into attack range. This combined makes for an agonizingly long fight that many people do not attempt without summons.
  • Malenia, this game’s answer to the Nameless King, not only has two health bars (albeit, average sized health bars, with weaknesses to Bleed and Frostbite), but also heals with every attack, making this an incredible test of endurance, especially factoring in moves like Waterfowl Dance which force you on the defensive.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has Grurn, the final boss at the end of the official plug-in Siege at Firemoth. Grurn has 2000 hp with a regeneration effect. For comparison, the final boss of the Tribunal expansion is a legitimate Physical God with 3000 HP and the Bloodmoon expansion's is an aspect of a god with 2000 HP, and neither possesses regeneration. Grurn's attacks aren't anything special, and if you have decent Resist Shock effects, he is almost incapable of harming you. That said, he still takes forever to kill.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 5: The Neon Valhalla, a stronger, optional version of the Neon Valkyrie. In addition to a huge base health pool that scales with the players, it has a unique self-healing distinct from the Regen status (meaning it cannot be Dispelled) where it heals itself every turn, forcing the player to out-damage it to make any progress. Complicating matters is that it frequently summons three backup Turrets that are difficult to just ignore, especially since most of them will be Bombs that must be taken out in three turns or they will deliver a One-Hit Kill attack to the party. This is lampshaded when the party enters the room it's found in and Lance, who knows all about its design, has a minor freak out and stresses that it needs to be hit as hard and fast as humanly possible.
• Want to take over Earth, Luna, Stardock Alpha or Ruby in Escape Velocity? Demanding tribute from any one of those will force you to gradually work your way through the several thousand ships in its defense fleet. Or Omm in Override. For a planet of worm eating pacifist monks, they have a surprisingly large defense force. Council isn't even worth trying.
• Etrian Odyssey:
  • The True Final Boss of each game certainly qualifies, sporting sky-high HP that dwarfs nearly everything else before them and deadly attacks that can level the party if not defended against. That of The Fafnir Knight has 140,000 HP, paired with a self-healing ability on top of flunkies that have 10,000 each. The ultimate DLC boss of the same game has a record-breaking 280,000.
  • Etrian Odyssey: The Golem is surprisingly tough due to its associated quest becoming available while you're about 10 levels too low to match it. When its HP is depleted, it gets back up at half health, putting the player in for a longer fight than they bargained for.
  • Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard: While a lot of bosses suffer from HP bloat in The Fafnir Knight remake, the three elemental Dragons get particularly nasty about it. The main issue is that they also summon a core that casts an elemental attack that grows stronger for every turn the core is alive, so you can't just ignore it or it will become too strong to handle. The cores have a non-trivial amount of HP, so you're going to need to take time off the main body to fight it, and the dragon can regenerate it periodically during the fight. All this, while the dragon continues to harass you with deadly attacks. The Great Dragon is the worst of them all, sporting 72,000 HP and a core with 13,000, on top of sky-high Strength that can one-shot your more fragile party members. You have a Guest-Star Party Member to help you out, but she's so poorly optimized she might as well be a meat shield.
  • Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan: There are two bosses which, if approached directly and challenged at once, will be sporting a full HP bar which is often too large for the party's resources to handle. This will mandate walking around the floor or boss room to trigger certain map events that will weaken it to manageable levels, going from this trope to Puzzle Boss. The two bosses in question are Boiling Lizard (Golden Lair) and Warped Savior (Hall of Darkness).
• This is a built in mechanic for the Player Owned Stations in EVE Online. They have so many hitpoints that they require dedicated ships whose sole purpose is to function as siege tanks against them, and it still takes hours or days with multiple units just to collapse their shields. This was to allow the owners of the station time to mount a counterattack before the station could be taken down.
• EverQuest has more than its share of Marathon Bosses, although some of them, such as the Sleeper, probably weren't supposed to be killed. Kerafyrm, AKA "The Sleeper" was intentionally designed to be unkillable. What is suppose to happen when you wake him up is that he goes on a rampage through various zones on the continent, getting his revenge against dragon-kind for putting him to sleep in the first place, and then disappearing forever. A ONE-TIME ONLY event for the entire server. After it happens, that's it, it will never happen again. The top three most powerful guilds on the Rallos Zek server took this as a challenge. Using Zerg Rush tactics to keep Kerafyrm distracted was the only way they could fight him, because he hit far too hard to properly tank him. On top of this, he was completely immune to all spell attacks except for the Shadowknight's Harm Touch and the Wizard's Manaburn, both which can only be used once every 90 minutes, and could only take hold once every minute on Kerafyrm himself. Nearly 300 players took roughly 3 hours to finally whittle him down to zero. His corpse had no loot.
• Fallout 3 has this in some of the expansion packs, although with new high level creatures rather than bosses, such as Super Mutant Overlords and Feral Ghoul Reavers, both of which can take several dozen shots to the head from the strongest weapons in the game and not flinch. The Super Mutant Behemoths can also take a long time to wear down if you aren't equipped with a Fat Man.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • Old World Blues has the Legendary Bloatfly, which has the HP of a Super Mutant Behemoth and spits One-Hit Kill plasma, and the X-42 Giant Robo Scorpion, which can have up to 3500 HP, the highest of all creatures in the series, and a damage threshold of 30, plus a Wave-Motion Gun on its stinger.
  • Lonesome Road's Big Bad Ulysses has the highest HP of any humanoid character, and is assisted by a pair of respawning Eyebots that restore his HP and repair his equipment.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • The Event Boss Ibaraki-Douji has trillions of HP. She's a raid boss designed for the entire playerbase to fight at once, each player reducing her total HP by one to six million per battle. Even with that, it takes several days for the players to reduce her health completely... and she keeps coming back six times, so the whole event battle lasts about two weeks in real time. Later raid bosses follow the same trend.
  • The Grand Finale of the first storyline features a battle between every Servant the player has interacted with over the course of the game up to that point fight against all 72 Demon God Pillars at once, and the Pillars keep instantly resurrecting as soon as they're killed. This is represented in-game as 7 Bosses, each of which has to be killed 2 million times in order to clear the stage (and the final one has to be killed 6 million times). The entire playerbase is given two weeks to do this.
  • In terms of non-community events, Kingprotea's fight in the Seraph rerun can easily turn into this. She starts with 2 million HP... on its own, not incredibly tough by this point in the game. However, every turn she gains 500,000 to her max HP, with no upper limit. If the player cannot defeat her on the first turn, or is unable to do more than 500,000 damage per turn (quite a difficult task), it seems impossible. However, if the player can last against her for over 21 turns, she starts stacking debuffs that massively lower her defense. Also, every five turns after that point, she will "reset" to 2 million HP for one turn before jumping back up to her previous total. Thus, the battle becomes one of attrition, as the player waits for her to accumulate enough defense debuffs for them to be able to strike a finishing blow.
  • The Climax Boss of Lostbelt 7, ORT, is possibly the most extreme example in the game. Not only are they a Sequential Boss, but its second and fourth form count on their own! For clarification:
    • The first of these two phases is the only single player story raid in the game, requiring multiple battles to win.
    • Servants slain during this phase cannot be used for the rest of the fight or on further attempts.
    • Most raid bosses have at most three health bars. ORT has seventeen in total during the raid phase alone, and an additional seven health bars for its final form outside that.
    • The first raid phase has 1 million hp per health bar... with later health bars upping it to 1.2 million, then increasing to 2 million, and finally 3 million for the final one. Altogether, there's an 21,000,000 HP to get through... for the raid phase.
    • The boss's final form is no slouch either... with seven health bars totalling 1.5 million HP in total. Though it lacks the sheer scale of the previous raid phase, the player is expected to do this battle all in one go, rather than whittling down the HP over multiple ones. And due to the way the health bars work, only a maximum of about a couple hundred thousand damage can be done at one time, if the player is extremely skilled (those kinds of numbers generally require set up to pull off in a single turn).
    • Finally, the boss changes classes at several points during the raid, giving it completely new resistances and weaknesses.
• Chaos, the final boss of Final Fantasy, at least in the remakes, has a whopping 20,000 HP. To put that in perspective, the second most durable boss only has a little over 5000. Plus, Chaos can cast Curaja to heal himself for 9999 HP whenever he feels like it.
• The final boss in Final Fantasy II, if you played the game normally (i.e not maxing out evasion, wearing armor, and not getting the Blood Sword). To put things in perspective, a party that has done an average amount of grinding will do about 300 damage per attack on the final boss, who has 15,000 HP and constantly heals itself for roughly 5,000 HP every time he uses a physical attack. Players who didn't utilize a Game-Breaker at some point will probably spend about four hours fighting the final boss.
• Final Fantasy V doesn't have a true marathon boss, per se, but it has a tactic that turns any boss into a marathon boss: Quickleak. Basically, you first have a Time Mage cast Quick, and then have them perform a Bio-based spell or attack to induce Sap status, including breaking a Bio Rod. However, you then DON'T use your other Quick turn, and wait. As ARavingLoon explained in this helpful video, Quick stops the in-game timer. Because Sap is linked to the timer, it will continue to run indefinitely as long as you're still in Quick until the enemy you use it on perishes. Moreover, being in Quick means the enemy can't attack you. Because Sap is a joke status (it only hits for 7.5 dps), every enemy, including superbosses Shinryuu and Omega, are susceptible to it. However, because Sap hits for so little damage, late-game bosses, with their HP in the five digits, take a couple hours at minimum to defeat. Because you have to cast it for each part, Neo-Exdeath takes eight hours. And in all of this, you can't do anything in-game. So you can either sit around and wait...or play a game of golf.
• Final Fantasy VI:
  • The final battle will Kefka has four phases, all with much damage necessary.
  • Then the Game Boy Advance version added a Superboss example for hardcore players. The Kaiser Dragon has 327,500 HP, and can easily take 20 minutes to kill. And once you've beaten him, you unlock the Soul Shrine, which involves fighting every boss from the bonus dungeon in a row, ending with Kaiser Dragon again (though by the point you're taking on the Soul Shrine, you're usually powerful enough to kill everybody quickly).
• Final Fantasy VII:
  • Superbosses Ruby and Emerald Weapons. Emerald Weapon is a particularly cruel case in that the game gives you a 20-minute time limit to beat it, unless one of the characters is equipped with a stupidly obscure piece of materia, which is more or less mandatory if you don't have a special strategy in mind.
  • There's also Sephiroth, the Final Boss. If you play through normally and don't grind for experience, the battle is about the length that you'd expect. However, reaching level 99 is a curse rather than a blessing, for Safer Sephiroth's stats are proportional to your level. Sephiroth can end up with 400,000 HP and insane defensive/attacking stats, meaning you'll be fighting him for quite a while.
• Final Fantasy VIII: has Ultimecia. There are two abilities that can break the standard cap of 9999 damage, and both are fairly hard to get, so you'll probably be damaging at or below that cap with every attack. The "Regen" spell heals you by a small amount every once in a while, apparently a set fraction of your maximum health. When you cast Regen on yourself with a maximum health of 9999 HP, that being another cap, the healing is still in the double digits. If Ultimecia's second form casts Regen, it'll heal itself in the high quadruple digits. Ultimecia has four forms and, by her fourth, it gets even worse as she can "blow" away junctions. If the battle ends up taking too long, you'll end up with minuscule stats and hp because the final boss took away all your junctions, and if this happens, you will lose and have to lose the past hour's worth of work.
• In Final Fantasy IX, the optional Marathon Boss was Ozma because the Ozma challenge was a Guide Dang It! Luck-Based Mission, in which you would spend more time healing, reviving and waiting to counter its attacks than actually dealing much damage. With a mere 65000 HP, Ozma can be taken down with less than nine hits, but that's before he casts Curse, followed by Meteor.
• Final Fantasy X:
  • Nemesis, the ultimate Monster Arena opponent, has 10 million HP. Many of the other creations may count too, depending on your level.
  • Many of the Dark Aeons and the mother of all Superbosses, Penance, from Final Fantasy X International. The weakest of the Dark Aeons has around 1 million HP. Dark Anima has 8 million HP (the highest of the Dark Aeons). Penance tops that with 12 million HP. And unlike some marathon bosses, all of them are hard. This YouTube video of the Penance fight: just under 36 minutes.
• Final Fantasy X-2:
  • Trema, who has 999999 HP, which is insane considering his defense. Funnily, he still goes down easier than Paragon that he killed in the pre-fight cutscene.
  • Angra Mainyu, located in the desert. Three targets and the main one has 333400 HP. Less than the above Trema, but a ton for a fight that is not located in the Bonus Dungeon. The two arm targets are easy to defeat, though the main target likes to heal them with Full Life a lot; and if all three of them are active on the field, they can use an attack that can easily spell death for your party. Even with using the 'easiest' strategy of having two strong Dark Knights for attacking all three targets at once and an Alchemist for easy healing, this fight can still take close to 30 minutes, if not more.
  • Monster Arena in Updated Re-release also has some of these. Expect enemies with, in some cases, wastly buffed-up stats such as Dark Bahamut with 120k HP or the above Trema who is thankfully (or unfortunately) the same. Major Numerus example is major example with it being four-headed space snake with 500k to 700k HP per head and each having wide array of lethal attacks, taking a long time to defeat if you don't use triple machina with Impale and maxed out stats.
• Pandemonium Warden of Final Fantasy XI. Absolute Virtue may be practically invincible, but 18 hours, and the Warden still isn't dead? Makes one wonder if the developers like leather and pain. Square Enix has changed things in response to the bad press about Pandemonium Warden so that both it and Absolute Virtue are weakened and will vanish after two hours of fighting. However, while the new PW isn't unreasonable to beat within the allotted time, AV remains unbeaten without cheating. SE seems to be fond of the Guide Dang It! Puzzle Boss, except without the "guide" part. Square-Enix seemed determined to make the guy literally unbeatable for a long while: every time a group managed to defeat him, often through "creative" use of mechanics, SE claimed that the method they used was "improper" and then patched him to cover that weakness. Since then, the game's level cap has been increased from 75 to 99, making it possible for players to achieve victory against Absolute Virtue by means of sheer brute force, though defeating it is still considered to be a monumental achievement by most.
• Final Fantasy XII:
  • Yiazmat, the ultimate Superboss, regularly takes players as much as 12 hours to kill, thanks to its astronomical 50 million HP. The real kicker? Near the end of the fight, Yiazmat pulls off a little trick that, if not caught and stopped, heals him back to full health.
    • The Renew spell heals the target to full HP. Yes, it can be Reflected. Guess which spell you're likely using to restore HP, and guess what he casts on your entire party without warning when at low health. Other 'nice' tricks are his ability to stop the delay of his special moves, including OHKOs, once he reaches a fifth of his health, and reducing the damage cap from 9999 to 6999 at half of his health. The minimum number of hits required is 6073.
    • Each of his physical attacks also have a 5% chance of being OHKOs. As he gets lower on health, his attack chains get longer (to a maximum of 12), with each of those hits retaining the 5% chance for Instant Death.
    • If a character moves out of his physical reach, he'll start spamming Instant Death spells on them (100% accurate without the Shell buff on the target, 50% accurate with it).
    • He can also use the "Growing Threat" skill to double his effective level.
    • In the IZJS and Zodiac Age versions, the damage cap is removed from player characters, but they are still limited in damage when Yiazmat puts his paling up. That is, if he can... There is a complex strategy that manages to deal enough damage to down him in about 25-30 minutes, involving reflecting Darkga off the caster and onto Yiazmat for five figure damage 3 times a cast, while also preventing him from hitting you through unique placement of characters. Even cheesing the crap out of him takes almost half an hour, plus the time taken to get everything into position.
  • If you fight Zodiark as soon as you can (after beating Giruvegan, but before you can buy the spell Scathe), and aren't at a high enough level to slice off his last 50,000 or so HP before he puts up a Paling, expect to spend at least half an hour taking off the last of his HP bit by bit with non-elemental magic spells such as Scourge or Drain.
• Final Fantasy XIII:
  • For main game bosses, it's Barthandelus. The first two fights with him can easily take up to 20 minutes because of his ridiculously high HP. He actually goes down fast in his final incarnation, but that's only the beginning.
  • Vercingetorix, who has 15.8 million HP (although it's worth noting that the default damage cap in that game is 99,999, not 9,999, and the fight will probably take no more than 15-20 minutes).
  • Some of the oretoises. An Adamantoise has loads of HP and its resistances mean you only do 10% of normal damage (1% of normal with any elemental attack.), although those resistances can be lowered by attacking its legs, which renders it briefly helpless and vulnerable. The target time for killing one is around 30 minutes (although a high-level party can potentially win in 2-3). The good news is that they're susceptible to Death, so with a little luck or a lot of patience the fight can be very short. Long Gui (the more powerful version of Adamantoise), however, are not vulnerable to Death.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2: The Final Boss, Garnet/Amber/Jet Bahamut. Garnet and Amber hang on to the side of the platform you're on and smack your party with powerful attacks, while Jet hovers a ways off and buffs Garnet and Amber. When you take down Garnet and Amber, who both have over 100,000 HP, Jet comes forth and challenges you. Jet has over a million HP, and gives you only a brief window of time to attack him before he revives Garnet and Amber, forcing you to take them down again. Also, after you start doing some serious damage to Jet, he starts using combination Flare attacks with Garnet and Amber, the strongest of which can easily wipe all but the most powerful of parties.
• Final Fantasy XIV generally avoids this outside of the highest-end content the game has to offer where this is to be expected, but Patch 5.1 introduced Hades' Elegy, the Extreme version of the final boss for the main story of the expansion. The entire fight is a grueling four phase struggle that could take upwards of 15 minutes to conquer even when done cleanly. Battles that long were until then unheard of at this particular tier of difficulty and was generally reserved for Savage tier difficulty. Fortunately the dev team knew just how long the fight was, and when one clears it they are mercifully granted two of the tokens for clearing as opposed to just one. This does not change the fact that the fight is incredibly long for a tier of content that often has complete strangers coming together to clear it as opposed to an organized raid static.
• Final Fantasy XV: The Adamantoise makes its return. Mercifully, it doesn't have as much HP or is as powerful as the XIII ones, but since the game doesn't have the stagger mechanic, it'll easily take at least half an hour to kill this thing.
• Final Fantasy XVI: The final boss definitely qualifies. He is first fought in a cinematic battle in which Ifrit, Phoenix, and Bahamut team up to take on a transformed version known as Ultima Prime. Clive then fights him one on one, then the player takes on the form of Ifrit Risen while Ultima himself becomes Ultima Risen, and he is afterwards fought in four separate phases as Ultimalius.
• Not present in the original Dissidia Final Fantasy, but there in the prequel, Duodecim. The version of Feral Chaos one must beat to unlock him as a playable character is, in addition to being at level 130 when the player is capped at 100, in possession of a stunning 125,000+ HP. In the Dissidia combat system, the most damage that can be done at one time is 9999 — but, given the way combat works, the player will only be able to pull off a 9999 damage hit rarely if at all against the boss, with hits in 500-1200HP damage range being far more likely. This, plus the fact that the player will be performing Bravery attacks in addition to HP attacks, plus the fact that the player is going to spend a loooot of time trying to avoid the boss's utterly devastating attacks, given that the player is likely to have only somewhere in the realm of 10K HP and basically has little-to-no healing... essentially, it adds up to a very long fight.
• World of Final Fantasy has the Supraltima Weapon, a beefed-up version of Final Fantasy VII's Ultimate Weapon, which uses an Anti-Frustration Feature to show just how hard fighting it is.^*For context: this fight is one of several quests in which the protagonists, Lann and Reynn, intervene in their friends' fights; they do the heavy lifting, whilst the friends see the fight won by their own hands. After the enemy takes a certain number of turns, the fight is cut short with a "The battle continues..." message, and the player is returned to a save-point area; upon activating the quest again, the fight resumes with the enemy's HP where it was when it was left. At a reasonable level for this point in the game, certain costly attacks will be doing anywhere from mid-1000's to low 2000's. Libra does not turn up an HP number, and this fight will take at least twenty-five rounds. Cloud sums up these fights pretty well in the preceding cutscene (which you will be seeing often).
  Cloud: If it's alive, it can die, so let's hit it till it does. As many times as it takes.
• Final Fantasy Brave Exvius features a bonus fight against Aigaion, a Giant Mecha with very high defensive stats, 10 million HP, Organ Autonomy for its arms (and each of those has 4 million hit points), the ability to regenerate said arms, and triggers for rather brutal attacks (such as the left arm instantly removing party members from the fight permanently if the right arm ever gets destroyed, or doing a massive counter if the player uses the one element that can neutralize the main body's strongest attack enough times). There are two ways to win the fight. The hard way is the fast way — destroy the main body, then destroy its arms, which requires being able to overcome the 500 thousand healing that the right arm can administer every round plus one character regularly dispelling the defensive buffs the right arm applies. The easier, slow way requires systematically destroying the arms in order so that they can't regenerate (10 times for the left, then 3 times for the right) before finally destroying the main body. Even with Power Creep making it so that it's easier to get powerful units to more easily pile on damage and defensive ones to cope with Aigaion's punishing attacks, the slow way still generally takes several hours to complete, and it was not unusual at launch to hear of players spending more than four hours and over 200 rounds of combat to finally win (with the fast way thought to be more of a Self-Imposed Challenge than an actual strategy).
• Fullmetal Alchemist and the Broken Angel: Practically every boss fight is like this, especially the endgame, where you have to fight THREE giant chimeras at the same time, one of which heals itself, then fight two more bosses with no refuel. And then two more bosses. While winning the last one is optional, it makes it pretty damn hard to achieve 100% Completion. This optional fight is against Colonel Mustang and Major Armstrong simultaneously. They have 6999 and 9999 health respectively, and your regular attacks do one damage per hit. Death of a Thousand Cuts indeed. The kicker? You need to do this fight twice to get 100% completion, because the fight ends before you can grab the item drop from whichever one you beat second.
  Travis Willingham (about this game): "Yeah, I still haven't kicked my own ass."

G - O

• ZOMG:
  • The Landshark and Shallow Sea / SeaLab X. It can take 6 hours to complete the latter with a full crew. On medium. The former takes around an hour to beat...with 20 other people attacking it.
  • Kamila, the boss of Deadman's Shadow. While an entire Shallow Sea/SeaLab run can take six hours on medium, just fighting Kamilia's Bloodlust form alone will usually take at least two hours, and that's if nobody wipes. Assuming everybody is Attuned, and everyone has their rings maxed to 12.0, an entire Bloodlust run can take as long as five hours, not counting time spent assigning buffs and time lost to disconnects and lag. If not everyone is Attuned, expect runs to last as long as eight hours or more, exclusive of buff assignments and time loss.
• Gaiapolis has its last boss, a Draconic Abomination large enough to take up half the arena it's fought in, and has 60 layers of health. And it's immune to attacks when unleashing its fiery breath, only vulnerable when you wait for it to pause, land and recharge. It only has two attacks, breathing fire and occasionally using its claws, but the fight's going to take quite a while.
• Self Imposed Challenges are a big part of God of War. One such challenge in God of War II involves using General Kratos on the hardest difficulty with no upgrades to weapons or magic. Almost every boss becomes a Marathon Boss due to the incredibly low damage Kratos deals in this mode, and the absurdly high damage he takes. For bonus points, some veterans complete the game using nothing but the starting Blades of Athena at Level 1, and ignoring chests.
• The final bosses of both GBA Golden Sun games. The first game's final boss is also a Sequential Boss (and its first form being a Dual Boss). Many of Golden Sun: The Lost Age's superbosses also qualify, most notably the Star Magician. The Dullahan can be, because it's a Puzzle Boss (unless you're massively overleveled) with attacks capable of screwing up your strategy.
  • Dullahan has more HP than the final boss, and if you play Hard Mode and randomly fight him in the Arena, he has the most HP any single monster can have. Alan Averill, formerly of Nintendo Power, said that most of the time he spent writing the part of the strategy guide for Dullahan was massive Level Grinding. To quote him, "When Dullahan finally fell to my blade, I ran around screaming like a madman."
  • For the first Golden Sun, there was Deadbeard, who was considerably harder than the final boss because of the fact that he resided in the biggest, hardest dungeon in the game.
  • The final boss of The Lost Age actually has multiple forms/HP meters, though they're not shown. In addition to the obvious issues of this trope, every other boss in the game can easily be bum-rushed with Summon Magic, and many players learn the hard way that trying to summon-rush the Doom Dragon only takes out the first, most harmless head, leaving them without defenses when the remaining heads start spamming Cruel Ruin and Djinn Storm.
• A rare driving game example, Gran Turismo 5 takes the cake in sheer length. Endurance races are the last races you tend to earn in GT5, and they are all raced in real time. This includes the Nurburgring 24 Hours, which is exactly what it sounds like: the longest track in the game, in its longest configuration, raced for a full day, alone. It can only be accessed by reaching Level 40, the highest experience level in the game. The real-time idea was mercifully dropped in GT6.
• Guild Wars 2 has several world bosses with 15-30 minute timers before the event fails, while failure to kill them before that will typically yield little or no reward.
  • The Claw of Jormag fight typically has six stages where it is impossible to directly damage the boss, forcing the players to instead deal with hordes of adds, protect friendly NPCs, and tear down ice structures. These stages can easily last several minutes each, while the boss itself can be damaged for less than a minute at a time between them. The total allowed time for the fight is 30 minutes.
  • Tequatl's battle has the boss depart the arena every 25% of his health bar, stopping the timer while another event plays out. If successful, Tequatl takes damage and the standard fight resumes. The boss encounter has a maximum length of 15 minutes, but the events raise it to a possible 21 minutes for a full-length fight.
  • The Prime Hologram during the Battle of Lion's Arch was a three-stage fight with a maximum time limit of 25 minutes. Successful fights typically ran 20 to 22 minutes. Unlike other bosses where downed players could run back, the Hologram arena could not be entered after the battle started, requiring those inside to resurrect others as well.
• The final boss of Gundemonium Recollection, Elixirel, has 11 forms, one for each node on the Tree of the Sefirot. The good news is the 11th is the True Final Boss, so you only have to deal with 10 most of the time.
• Hollow Knight has a lot of these. One is the final boss, who throws swords, exploding sun orbs, lasers, spike floors, and walls of light at you. There's also the True Final Boss, which is essentially the final boss's powered-up sister in that she's faster and has more HP. And you also have to beat every other boss in the game plus some new ones to get to her. And, if you die, you have to run the whole gauntlet again. The third is Nightmare King Grimm, the final boss of one path of the Grimm Troupe expansion, who not only shoots flaming bats and teleports but also shoots spikes out of the floor, turns into a drill to zip across the screen, slashes at you with his cloak, and sends giant firespouts out of the floor. Grab a water bottle, a snack, and a cushion or five, because you're going to be there for quite awhile.
• The boss of the Rubina level in Hydorah doesn't actually have much health, however there are two rotating rings of shields which make hitting it really difficult. Plus your weapons are almost certainly at the lowest level when you face it, given Continuing is Painful and the difficulty of the preceding level. Expect to hear the music loop multiple times during the fight.
  • Unless you use the Wave, in which case you can defeat it in seconds. Unfortunately, you can't get the Wave until much later in the game, so it doesn't help unless you deliberately skip Rubina and come back to it later.
• Of the six bosses in Iji, three could be easily said to be marathon bosses, especially on higher difficulty levels; worse still is the fact that they're Puzzle Bosses who you're supposed to damage with either the arena or by reflecting one of their attacks, which serves to make the fights very repetitive. And any attempt to defeat the Sentinel without using the power fields (something you have to do if you want to get 100%), or Tor later on with Maximum Charge, on Ultimortal, will effectively take you upwards of ten minutes — and that's if you're lucky/skilled enough to beat them within that time frame. To put it into perspective, the maker of this game takes more than seven minutes to put the second one down!
• This video of a boss from a I Wanna Be the Guy fangame. Even with the assistance of a macro to spam the fire button, it's still absurd.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts has several:
    • One of the superbosses, the Ice Titan, is a pain because the primary way to damage it is to deflect one of its attacks back at it, which as the fight goes on, it will do less and less, and often whilst you are in no position to be able to deflect it.
    • Sephiroth, another superboss, is easier to damage, but has a ridiculously large shield to whittle down before his health bar even begins to deplete, and has attacks which will almost kill you, even at full health. He's mostly the same in the second game, where he has 15 health bars (the final boss has at most 7/8).
    • During her first stage, Ursula can be this if you don't know the trick, which King Triton rather vaguely tells you. You have to use spells on her cauldron until it blows up in her face. If you don't do this, you'll have to hit her a lot because she's the only boss who doesn't take normal damage. Though, if you level up enough, Ursula can be easily defeated entirely without magic.
    • The final boss consists of about four separate phases, all of which have more than one life bar and put up a hell of a fight, with the last phase having phases all its own! Oh, and death will set you back to the beginning of phase 1, 2 or 4 depending on which phase you died in.
  • Marluxia, the final boss of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. In the GBA version, where most bosses have two, maybe three health bars, he has four. Not only that, but you can't actually damage him normally unless you go through his entire attack pattern. And when you do reach that point, you only have a few seconds since wind is blowing you off. Thankfully he's also open to attack every now and then, but it's unlikely you'll have strong enough cards to really exploit it until after you beat him. The PS2 version reduces his HP and gives you more openings for attack, but also adds a second form with more HP than the first, a sleight that does nothing but blow you away from the boss, and another that smacks all the cards out of your deck and forces you to run around and collect them. And the final boss for the Reverse/Rebirth mode, Ansem, is just as bad, if not worse, in the GBA version.
  • Kingdom Hearts II has a final boss with at least 6 different parts to it; one part, The Giant Nobody Dragon, is even split into 3/4 stages!
  • Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days has plenty of marathon bosses, some during the campaign and some optional.
    • There's the fight against Xion, which contains 4 stages, and isn't even the final boss. Although, despite being the second-last boss, it's more of a final boss than the actual final boss, Riku, who doesn't have multiple phases.
    • There's also the Leechgrave, which takes the Sequential Boss trope to an extreme. It requires you to defeat its tentacles before you even have a shot at the main body, which is only vulnerable for about twenty seconds before new tentacles spawn.
    • Next is the Ruler of the Sky, which constantly tries to avoid you and is also a Sequential Boss that requires you to destroy its tail segments first.
    • The optional ones include the Zip Slasher, which is a straight-up Damage-Sponge Boss, the Invisible, which is just as hard to hit as it is in its original incarnation but has a buttload more health, and finally the Dustflier, which is a Damage-Sponge Boss that also has absurdly powerful attacks with ridiculously wide ranges.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep Final Mix has No Heart. Like most superbosses in the series, he attacks almost constantly. On top of this he has 9 Health bars and excellent defense (Roughly 1800 HP and the most a player can ever do is 10-15 with maxed level and equipment). This amounts to 20-40 minutes of battling, monstrous compared to the 2-5 minutes typical of the series. No Heart takes so long because he is expected to be faced by multiple players at once, in a multiplayer battle, which would result in a more "reasonable" time to beat. When Birth By Sleep Final Mix was remade for the PS3 (as 2.5 HD Remix), No Heart's HP and defense were heavily nerfed because multiplayer is no longer an option in the Playstation 3 version, resulting in a considerably shorter fight.
    • The vanilla version of the game and the Updated Re-release have Vanitas Remnant, a Monochrome Palette Swap of a recurring boss throughout the game. He doesn't have much health, 200 compared to the 700 he has when you encounter the normal version at the end of the game, but has staggeringly high strength; 80 compared to his endgame normal version's 26, and extremely high defense; the Remnant has 27 defense compared to the normal endgame version's 15 defense. In addition to that, Vanitas Remnant has several devastating attacks that the normal version didn't have, including one that makes him totally invincible while he launches a series of devastating ranged attacks. But wait, there's more! He also takes 50 percent reduced damage from physical attacks, as well as 75 percent reduced damage from fire, ice and lightning attacks, and is immune to everything else; combine that will his already high defense, and you'll probably spend the entire fight hitting him for Scratch Damage unless you've done an obscene amount of level grinding. Then, if you take damage at any point in the fight, it will almost One-Hit Kill you unless you have Second Chance and Once More equipped, due to his aforementioned staggeringly high attack, but you can't use the Cure/Cura/Curaga spell to heal yourself, or he will just use Cure/Cura/Curaga on himself instantly, healing him probably back to full health since he has so little health to begin with. So you're forced to use your limited amount of curative items, which will deplete over the course of the fight. The entire fight will probably consist of you dodging his attacks, getting in one or two scratch damage attacks, and then going right back on the defensive until he opens himself up again.
    • Rather fittingly, the superboss to end all superbosses in the franchise, Kingdom Hearts III: Re𝄌Mind's Yozora, will take you an absolute age to come out on top against, assuming you can at all. For starters, he has 20 life bars, more than any other boss in the whole franchise. And this doesn't take into account his high defense and the ridiculous amount of highly-damaging attacks he has, one of which can steal your items, and another of which can steal your weapon. And this isn't even the worst part. One of the items he can steal is your Kupo Coin, an Auto-Revive that replenishes your HP to full if you take a lethal blow. And if you deplete his health after he's done this, he goes into a fake death animation before getting 10 of his life bars back.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • Spoofed when the final battle actually doesn't take all that long, but the dialogue at the start of the third form claims it is:
    "Dang it!" you shout. "How many times do I have to kill you? This battle has taken over a half an hour and there's no save point!"
  • Spoofed again with Ed the Undying, whom you have to fight seven times, dismembering him into progressively smaller collections of limbs (and halving his maximum hit points each time). You eventually sweep his remains into the corner while he's still taunting you.
• Kirby:
  • The Computer Virus is this in general in the Arenas of Kirby Super Star. The Arenas are, by nature, about getting a good time, and the format of the Computer Virus battle seems to exist solely to slow you down. In Helper To Hero, some abilities are affected worse than others by it. Special mention goes to Knuckle Joe, who cannot deal enough damage in one go to defeat the Computer Virus with anything resembling quickness. Oftentimes, the Computer Virus battle can make up a solid 1/4 to 1/2 of a Knuckle Joe run.
  • Dark Mind in Kirby & the Amazing Mirror is considered to be one of the longest final bosses in the series. Dark Mind's first form has to be fought 4 times, on different terrain. After that, you'll have to fight his second form followed by his final form. At least you get to wail on him during the credits.
  • Kirby: Canvas Curse: Paint Panic Level 3, an optional encounter with Paint Roller. In Paint Panic, you have to complete a series of Connect-The-Dots puzzles within an allotted time - failure results in Kirby taking a point of damage. While the Level 1 and Level 2 encounters are totally reasonable (requiring only 10 and 20 puzzles, respectively), Level 3 expects you to finish 99 puzzles of escalating complexity. Even a successful attempt at this fight can take upwards of 15 minutes to complete, potentially with pause breaks due to the strain it can put on the player's hand.
  • Pyribbit in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, as he starts to spend a lot of time in the background during the second phase and spends very little time vulnerable with he does show up to be hit. If you take a hit during that time (and you likely will, as every time he comes back to Kirby's platform, it's accompanied by an attack) and spend most of it stunned, the fight will only take longer. Made even worse in Dededetour!, where you not only have to fight Pyribbit DX, but you have to be quick about it, too.
  • Kirby: Planet Robobot has the single longest boss fight in the series with its Final Boss. Star Dream is a shoot-em-up fight that can take a good ten minutes to complete, having three forms, each with their own health bar. The True Arena exaggerates this even further with Star Dream Soul OS, which makes the first three forms stronger (with some new moves) and adds on one last form. It really does say quite a lot that a majority of this game's True Arena is fighting Star Dream Soul OS..
  • Kirby Star Allies takes it even further than Planet Robobot did with its own Final Boss: Void Termina. As with the aforementioned Star Dream, he can take a good ten minutes to beat. He has a whopping four phases, two of which you fight on the Star Allies Sparkler and two of which you fight inside his innards, and both the first and third phases each have you shooting the eyes that pop up on his different body parts; destroying them causes massive damage to him, and once all five eyes are destroyed, he'll fall prone and you'll head into his innards to attack his heart as well as his essence. Luckily, his attacks are slow and simple enough that you should be able to take your time throughout the fight. Soul Melter throws in several differences in the form of some extra attacks and makes them slightly more difficult to dodge but still not too tough to do so, and Void Soul gains a few new attacks as well. His Soul Melter EX version isn't too different other than seriously ramping up the difficulty and making his attacks faster, and Void comes close to Bullet Hell with his new attacks and throws in several references to Dark Mind, Drawcia Soul and Zero with his new attacks as the fight draws closer to a close.
• Bosses in The Legend of Dragoon are all like this due simply to the mechanics of the game. If you haven't played it, magic is outrageously rare and is for use on bosses only. Only two characters have healing magic at all (Shana/Miranda and Meru), but Shana and Miranda are so much better at it than Meru and Boss battles with Shana and Miranda take forever, and the item limit is quite low. The way you heal is that every time you defend, you heal 10% of your maximum health. It definitely adds length to every boss fight. This isn't to say anything about the Final Boss, which can easily take an hour or two if your characters aren't grossly overlevelled.
• Tropicallo from Legend of Mana: instead of taking damage like a regular boss, it loses a set fraction every time one of its two tendrils dies. One of them is an insanely tough attacking type tendril, the other casts magic and has a humongous self-destruct attack when detached. In the Nightmare and No Future modes, it does rather more damage, but is still a cakewalk. Unfortunately, while it winds up with a hundred health bars, the amount of damage dealt to it with each tendril's death doesn't increase, meaning that you will literally spend hours trying to put it out of its well-deserved misery. (Unless you turned off No Future mode before fighting it...)
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
  • Zant, due to being a Final-Exam Boss. He teleports himself alongside Link and Midna to different parts of Hyrule, namely battlefields where previous bosses and minibosses were fought beforehand. After five phases, you have to fight him in a lengthy one-one-one sword duel in the southern yard outside Hyrule Castle.
  • Ganondorf. After going through a gruelling route to the top of Hyrule Castle, with three Darknuts to face, including one right by the entrance to the boss room, you have to go up against Ganondorf himself. First, he possesses Zelda, as a Tennis Boss with a nasty habit of stabbing you and using light magic to fry the floor around you. Then, he turns into the giant beast, Ganon, who you either have to be good at shooting in the crystal above his eyes or use the Wolf Link form with Midna to wrestle to the ground before going for his belly. Then he goes riding across Hyrule Field and you have to keep him directly ahead of you so Zelda can stun him with Light Arrows, all while dodging his summoned ghost riders and avoiding his occasional opportunistic attacks, and THEN you finally face off in a brutal one-on-one swordfight.
• The Definitive Edition of LISA: The Painful adds a new Superboss - the Manifestation of Marty. It has a gigantic 100.000 health points and very high defense, and on top of that you need to go through two waves of enemies before being even allowed to face it. However, it has a unique raid mechanic that allows you to run away from the battle, access your inventory screen, and then try the battle again; the boss itself will not recover any HP in-between runs, but the enemies of the first two phases will respawn and might even receive additional power-ups.
• The Negativitron of LittleBIGPlanet 2, who can only be hit at certain intervals of the fight, and all you can do is attempt to survive in between phases. Beating him can be very stressful as you get low on lives, but acing the fight (that is, beating him without a single death) is the real nightmare.
• Lollipop Chainsaw features multiple multi-stage bosses that take 2-3 finishers to kill, but Lewis Legend beats them all out by requiring seven finishers. Even Nick, who's been terrified and upset by the whole zombie apocalypse and being bodyless situation, stops being scared and just ends up annoyed the guy won't friggin die already.
• Lufia:
  • In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, if you want to beat Gades during your first encounter with him and have put in the required amount of level grinding to actually LET you do it, you're in for a good 20-30 minutes of battle.
  • The Egg Dragon of both Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals and Lufia: The Legend Returns is intended to be this, hitting the Cap of 65,535 HP. However, there's a glitch that lets the player humorously subvert this: chuck a Potion at it at the very beginning of the fight, watch its health overflow to a really small number, then hit it with an attack and watch it die. If you want to go at it the "real" way, though, you're in for a long haul.
  • And there's no easy way around Lufia: The Legend Returns's Iris. Not only do you have to make it through the 200-floor Ancient Cave just to get to her, you have to take down her 50,000 HP while she throws the game's strongest attacks at you, inflicts status ailments including the dreaded Confuse, and reflects attacks back at their users. Percent Damage Attacks would help you here, as they do in the game's other tough boss fights...unless you didn't find any in the randomly-generated Ancient Cave. And all this with no save points on a battery-powered portable system!
• Luxaren Allure: Darkloft, who, before being made easier, was known to take ~23 minutes to beat.
• The final boss of the NES Licensed Game of Mad Max takes about 20 crossbow bolts to deplete one segment of his life meter. If you didn't collect enough ammo during the last Road War, you're toast.
• Magic: The Gathering's first Licensed Game, on the plane of Shandalar, featured the Big Bad Arzakon. On the easiest level, he has 100 life. On the hardest level, he has 400. To put this in context, in a standard game of Magic, players have 20 life, and in Shandalar, both you and the mooks tend to have lower life. But he uses a five-color deck with almost no mana fixing, so it's entirely possible that, even at 400 life, you're staring at just land on the other side of the table. Also, Shandalar's way more spell-friendly than most of the multiverse — it's not implausible that by the time you face Arzakon you have a deck that can do over 400 points of damage. In one round. Conceivably, on the first round.
• The difference between the real bosses and the smaller "Area Bosses" in MapleStory is that the real bosses take upwards of two hours to kill with a full party of overleveled characters while the Area Bosses go down in less than two or three minutes if they don't kill you first. To put it bluntly, the most recent raid bosses have trillions of HP. Even after Nexon removed the damage cap, entire parties consisting of players hitting for several hundred million damage multiple times a second still take anywhere between ten and twenty minutes to beat them, assuming they aren't taken out by the veritable Bullet Hell scenarios they're forced to dodge.
• Mega Man 9 plays with this trope. One of the achievements there can be gotten only after fighting a boss for at least 10 minutes and winning.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty's penultimate boss fight, Metal Gear RAY. On the easiest difficulty setting, you only have to defeat three of them and they can be killed in five hits maximum. On the hardest two, you have to defeat twenty of them, and they all have masses of HP.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has two:
    • The End, a sniper battle that can easily take an hour or more if you don't kill him via Easter Egg (by sniping him long before the battle starts, or by waiting a real-time week for him to die of old age). As a webcomic said it... "Hey, you wanna have a 45-minutes sniper fight?" Hideo Kojima originally wanted the fight to last two weeks, but was talked out of it.
    • The fight with The Sorrow can easily become one if you've been playing aggressively so far, and you don't know (or don't use) the quick way.
  • In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, the second Peace Walker fight can easily be one of these in single-player mode. She has massive amounts of HP, a weak point which she often moves around making it difficult to hit her, various attacks which can freeze you or knock you over, and an ability which makes rocket weapons useless for about two minutes. She also regularly takes cover behind some buildings you can't follow her to. And you have limited ammo.
• Metroid:
  • The first form from the eponymous final boss of the first Metroid Prime game is this. The battle itself really isn't too hard, but it takes forever. Even your most powerful weapons, like the Ice Spreader, do only minor damage to it, and a lot of times miss and hit his impervious lower body. Nothing says "screw you" like wasting ten good missiles to hit him with an Ice Spreader, only for it to bounce off.
  • A lot of bosses in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes are given ridiculous longevity (large amounts of HP and multiple phases), as well as the fun bonus of them being Puzzle Bosses. Adding to it is that most of them are fought in an environment that constantly drains your energy. Note that they are long battles by action game standards, as they are still much shorter than many other of the examples in this page. Special mention goes to the final bosses. The first one has multiple phases, all of which are long endurance matches (there was an additional phase that was Dummied Out). Meanwhile, the second is timed and you have to use an almost Guide Dang It!-y trick to beat it; fortunately, losing just causes you to go back to the beginning of the second boss. Another notable example is Chykka, which takes a particularly long time. Dark World boss fights do have the light crystals, which slowly heal you, so they might have felt justified in that you have a theoretically infinite supply of health.
  • Two bosses from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption take a long time if you don't know how to beat them: Mogenar and Final Boss Aurora Unit 313. If you try to use the wrong strategy against Mogenar, its regeneration will prolong the battle more and more. However, if you attack him the right way (and are quick), his regeneration won't even factor into it. Aurora Unit 313 is even worse because it's got four different attacks, and they all take a major chunk out of your remaining energy if they hit.
• All of Monster Hunter. It's a Boss Game so almost every mission is just a boss fight.
  • While the earlier large monsters can take 10-15 minutes, the end game bosses can take up to 45 minutes, and some of these are even with four hunters hitting it. Keep in mind that most fights have a time limit of 50 minutes so it's EXPECTED to take that long.
  • The Elder Dragons, especially the the huge ones (i.e Ceadeus, Jhen Mohran, and Lao-Shan-Lung), have extreme HP and take at least 30 minutes or more. And most of the time they have a SMALLER TIME LIMIT than standard.
  • Any monster that takes a long time to kill will just be a nightmare when you have to fight more than one at the same time. The only mercy applied is that they do have slightly lower HP.
• Some of the later bosses in the Nintendo DS FPS Moon can take 192 bullets from your rifle (that being the maximum you can carry) and still be less than halfway to dead. Matters are exacerbated by the fact that sniper rifle ammunition is rare and the pistol's hard to use while dodging, so you'll be using your assault rifle for the rest of the fight, which damages bosses so little that only on the rare occasions they stop shooting at you temporarily will you be able to see their health bars going down as you pump them full of lead. Dying and retrying four or five times can lead to physical pain in one's left hand (that being the one in charge of holding down the L button to rapid-fire.)
• Bosses in the Mortal Kombat series usually have much more HP or higher defense than normal characters, and most are SNK Bosses to boot.
• No More Heroes:
  • The normal final boss, Jeane, takes a very long time to wear down, especially on Bitter difficulty. And each time she takes a certain amount of damage, she'll reduce the diameter of the battlefield, forcing Travis to focus on evading her attacks and only retaliating when there's a reliable window.
  • The True Final Boss, Henry, on Bitter difficulty, can take nearly a thousand hits before dying. You generally can do less than ten hits off a dark step (the timing for which is tighter in this fight than in any other in the game). Trying to exploit his normal openings will land you maybe three hits at a time, and a high chance of getting countered by something nasty.
• The True Final Boss of Octopath Traveler, accessed after completing all eight travelers' stories, a sidequest chain and a Boss Rush, the dark god Galdera, is a very long two-stage battle. The first stage pits you against a foe that has 500,000 HP (three times as much as the strongest optional bosses) and is guarded by three lesser enemies with 50,000 HP each and different weaknesses from each other, making it difficult to kill the three enemies simultaneously. In the second stage, the boss has less health, but is protected by three other targets with similar amounts of health, all of which must be killed in order to get a shot at the boss. To make matters worse, if you die on either stage of the boss, you must start at the beginning and do all eight bosses in the Boss Rush all over again.
• Ōkami:
  • The Mini-Boss battles during the Bandit Spider challenges are very lenghty, since both the minibosses involved and the enemies have their HP significantly buffed.
  • Among the regular bosses, Orochi stands out for the need to destroy the seal (within a bell) in his central belly, and then the eight heads one by one. There's also Yami, which has to be fought across five lengthy phases, and in them Amaterasu has to retrieve the stolen brush techniques one by one, which further prolongs the fight.

P - Y

• The final boss in the original DS version of Pac 'n Roll has five different phases, each of which are the same length as one of the previous boss fights in the game. As there are only four other bosses in the game, this one fight is longer than all of the others combined.
• Persona 3:
  • The Final Boss is the "lots of smaller fights in a row" variant. Unless you're insane enough to build everyone to Level 99, in which case... fifteen minutes. Less if you have Armageddon.
  • The battle against Fortune and Strength usually lasts about half an hour, though certain strategies, correct abilities and good timing on Fortune's Status Effect Roulette can end the fight in minutes.
• Persona 4 has Shadow Mitsuo. At the very start of the fight, he creates a high-HP barrier around himself called "Mitsuo the Hero". Once you've defeated Mitsuo the Hero, you get to start hitting Shadow Mitsuo's health bar, which is not insignificant by any means. Shadow Mitsuo can also rebuild Mitsuo the Hero - you can stop him if you do enough damage before he gets it up, but this isn't an easy feat. This resets Mitsuo the Hero's health bar, and you'll have to defeat it all over again before you can get back to wailing on Shadow Mitsuo himself.
• In Persona 5, the final boss of the Cruise Ship palace and head of The Conspiracy against the Phantom Thieves, Masayoshi Shido has five different phases, the first four of which serve to soften you up for his brutal final phase. To wit: he gets an extra turn for throwing party-wide damage from every element in the game at you, fishing for weaknesses in addition to doing everything the fourth phase does (a physical Fear-inducing attack and several debuffs); if he gets a knockdown, he'll follow it up with a One-Hit Kill attack, another Fear inducer, or Heat Riser to buff all his stats, all of which are really bad because he already hits like a truck on steroids. Your saving grace in the fight is that his rotation for the party-wide skills is predetermined, so having mass party-swap or Magic Barriers at the right times can lessen the sting, but if you lack both, the boss will get three guaranteed knockdowns over the course of the fight, which can snowball into a Game Over very quickly.
• Pikmin:
  • Pikmin (2001): The Emperor Bulblax has a buffed life meter that takes much longer than any other creature to go down.
  • Pikmin 2: If you're playing cautious with your Pikmin, the Titan Dweevil can go on for somewhere around 45 minutes. The reason is because all of its attached objects have to be disabled one by one, and each a high amount of hit points has to be inflicted. Even after you disable all the objects, you still have to kill the surprisingly bulky Clipped-Wing Angel form. This trope can also happen with some of the more powerful bosses, such as the Pileated Snagret and Man-at-Legs.
  • Pikmin 3: The Plasm Wraith continues the tradition of long-lasting final bosses. Before you even actually fight it, you're forced to go through the longest Escort Mission in the game. Once the actual fight begins, you'll very quickly discover that the boss easily rivals the Titan Dweevil in regards of total health. Be aware that the boss' health can actually regenerate if you don't go out of your way to attack the source of healing. In fact, it can take so much punishment, you don't actually end up killing it.
  • Among the bosses of the Arachnorb family, the Shaggy Long Legs in the third takes the longest to defeat because the player has to unveil the weak point first, and for that all eight knots of hair (located in the legs) have to be dealt with. It doesn't help that the boss has a bad habit of moving from one place to another, forcing the captains to either go on foot to the proper destination to resume the fight, or split up to intercept the boss (which itself is risky if one of the captains is currently low on Pikmin).
  • Pikmin 4: The final boss, the Ancient Sirehound, must be fought through five phases. All five phases require the player to throw enough pikmin to knock it over before a weak spot is exposed. Its first phase has no special qualities beyond its regular attacks, but its subsequent phases include ice attacks, electrical attacks, and fire attacks, and its final phase involves special attacks no pikmin are immune to which causes them to panic and scatter, exposing them to the boss's attacks if not quickly retrieved. Oh, and it's also fought at the bottom of a 20 floor cave.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: The Zombot Aerostatic Gondola in the Lost City world. The zombies it sends aren't especially strong, but your plants are fairly weak and you don't get any long-range multiple-attack plant, meaning that you can only wear the Gondola down slowly.
• Pokémon: Legendary Pokémon fights count as this as well, especially if you're trying to catch them: every legendary has an exceptionally low catch rate, forcing you to waste tons of Ultra/Dusk/Timer Balls (or just get extremely lucky). You can avoid this with a Master Ball, though you usually only get one per game, and they really should be used on Roaming Legendaries.
• [PROTOTYPE]: Elizabeth Greene. Depending on how you've set up Alex and how you use artillery, tanks, and helicopters, you can potentially take down Greene in, oh, say, fifteen minutes of continuous pounding.
• Psychonauts: The Brain Tank. The only time you can even hurt it is for a brief moment when it occasionally tries to charge you. And you have to hit it quite a few times. It is also throwing Interface Screw bombs at you the whole time, and this is merely phase 1, and you don't get to heal at all in the much more difficult phase 2.
• Punch-Out!! has King Hippo, a fat, overgrown boxer from Parts Unknown that has an amount of HP so large that it is only required to knock him down once to win. And in the Wii version, when fought in Title Defense mode, he'll tie a manhole cover to his belly so you can't hurt him there without removing it first, which only prolongs further the fight.
• Rabi-Ribi has a few pretty long fights (it's not unusual for late game bosses to take upwards of 20 minutes to fight), but two of them stand above the rest:
  • First is Rumi, the penultimate post-game boss. She has a ridiculous SIX lifebars (The final boss of the game had three forms, but each was only only lifebar), and that's only part of the reason why she takes so long. For every lifebar except the first, she starts by taking the battle into a flying section, which severely limits your combat options, and when that is over, she puts the 99Reflect buff on herself for the duration of one attack (and her attacks are pretty long) which makes it impossible to deal relevant damage to her while it is up. Finally, she also has a permanent buff that cuts all damage you do to her by half. Put everything together, and you're in for an exhausting fight.
  • Second is one of the SP Bosses, Miru Syndrome. The gimmick to her fight is that you are unable to deal much damage to her at first, and must focus on just surviving until an event triggers where you get back your partner and the boss' defenses go down to a reasonable level. But how long does it take for the event to trigger? Around eleven and a half minutes, during which the boss goes through six different phases. And while she can be defeated pretty quickly after the event on lower difficulties, the battle can go on for much longer if you're fighting one of the harder versions of her.
• The final fight against the Thugs 4 Less leader in Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando. Mostly because you'll be sat in a turret, constantly trying to shoot away his bombs, rather than actually just shooting him. Even the developers admit he simply has way too many hit points.^note Though if you take off his last hit points with one of your standard weapons, it gets a HUGE boost of Weapon EXP.
• Reflux, the final boss of Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, has 4 phases. The first form requires you to alternate between taking down his barrier before slugging him in the face. He then shoves his scepter into his back and grows larger. You then spend your time circling the arena before climbing up his back and hitting his scepter to damage him. After that, he'll ascend into the air, with you having to climb up platforms before you can fire a missile at his scepter. Lose at any point until the final phase and you'll have to start from Phase 1 again. After all that, the game saves your progress so you face Reflux's final form. His final form consists of a shooter segment where you have to destroy his barrier then shoot him in the face. Once he hits the ground, you have to kill off all the Hoodlums he spawns to stop him regenerating. The two phases alternate until he turns to crystal and shatters. Fortunately the last thing to do is use a technique to turn Andre back into a Red Lum, something you've already done several times. Whew.
• In Rock Band and Guitar Hero, while the time needed to beat them may pale in comparison to some other examples on this page, any song that reaches over eight minutes or so becomes one of these. "Do You Feel Like We Do" (Live) from Guitar Hero 5 pushes it even further with almost fourteen minutes of playing.
  • "Freebird", the Final Boss of GH2, and "Through The Fire and Flames", the Superboss of GH3.
  • Also, the Endless Setlist challenges in the numbered titles are guaranteed to take over an hour. Subverted slightly in that you can pause in the middle of any song... unless, of course, you want that Steel Bladder achievement, in which case you have to never pause the game and never fail a song during the entire setlist.
  • In Rock Band, the Endless Setlist challenges will take (on average) 5+ hours. The challenge itself is to play the entire game's tracklist in one concert. 84 songs x 3 (on average though usually higher) minutes, = approximately 300 minutes, or 5 hours.
  • Another example is Metallica's "One", which, while only just short of 8 minutes, starts with a 30-second intro of absolutely no playing. Seeing as the song waits until the five-minute mark before trying to wear you down with a carpal tunnel-inducing riff, and then a minute later unleashes a sudden, difficult solo that can crush you in seconds, you'll likely be wasting far more time trying to beat it than you should.
• Scourge: Outbreak has the second dropship boss. It is far more durable and heavily-armed than the first, and it's two turrets - each having an individual health bar - needs to be destroyed before players can attack it's main body. Unlike the first, there isn't a mounted heavy machine-gun or easily-sabotaged antenna systems to make things easier; the dropship needs to have it's lengthy health meters (all three of them!) chipped away, one-by-one.
• The original Shadow Hearts has the Superboss that is required to get the best Fusion for Yuri, Seraphic Radiance. It's very predictabe, as its attacks don't vary much, but the fact that you have to fight it with only one character, who takes all the damage and has to do all his own healing, can make the fight last half an hour or more.
• The third Sister Grimm in Shadows of the Damned. There's actually a health vendor in the boss arena, which you will likely need if you don't know her weakness (fully charged skull blasts to the core).
• Shameless Clone: The boss of Italian Plumber World/8-Bit World has a lot more health than any of the other bosses, to the point that a single phrase takes more time than the second game's entire final boss.
• Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne has Noah, who likes to change what elements he takes damage from regularly and is one of the few things resistant to Almighty spells, so if you don't have demons with multiple elemental attacks you will have a long-ass battle on your hands, and even if you do it's still going to take a while. Even worse is the True Final Boss Lucifer, who boasts Almighty resistance, and resistance to everything to else on top of it. Unlike Noah, however, Lucifer doesn't shuffle resistances and open up holes in his defense. There is a setup that can punch through his defenses for pretty good damage, but it requires building that setup from the beginning of the game, and even then the battle can take the better part of a half-hour if Lucifer's AI is feeling merciful. If you didn't go for the aforementioned build, you'll be there for hours.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV has the DLC superbosses Ancient of Days and Sanat Kumaya. The former especially, as it has Diarahan (a spell that restores all of its health) and it will spam it if you hit its weakness (this forces you to get another DLC that provides the only source of the Brand ability other than Ancient of Days himself). The third DLC Superboss, Masakado's Shadow, would be this if not for the fact that it has a turn limit, especially since it doesn't hit terribly hard compared to the other two.
• Skies of Arcadia has a few, mostly ship battles like; Georgio, the Hydra and of course Zelos (hell, all of the gigas count really). But it also has a tortoise boss battle where the boss can put up a shield to prevent you causing any damage and it will heal itself. It'll do this around every four turns so you better hope you can cause enough damage to keep up with it.
• Skylanders: Trap Team has the battle against Ultra Traptanium Kaos, which can take 30-45 minutes and eat through vast armies of skylanders.
• The final boss in Sol Cresta is a long four phase fight, with the boss setting up a different elemental barrier in each of the first three phases then turning gold and becoming more aggressive in the final phase. Its an even longer fight in Dramatic Mode, as the player must survive through a lengthy cutscene until the cutscene power up happens.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Dark Gaia, the final boss of Sonic Unleashed will force the player through multiple rounds of at least three different, yet similarly difficult styles of gameplay that must be executed with near flawless precision to win. Mercifully, the game marks each genre change as a checkpoint of sorts, meaning that deaths aren't too frustrating. It's a marathon boss in-narrative, too; compared to anything that came before, Sonic is dead tired by the time Dark Gaia is put back to sleep, and it's up to Chip to get him out before the three of them are sealed within the earth together.
  • Previously, many of the bosses in Sonic Heroes were quite time-consuming, because they had such a large amount of HP compared to the player's output. Egg Emperor took this to the point of being the Goddamned Boss.
  • Fighting Metal Sonic in Sonic Mania can take even longer than the stage itself. You first have to run along a road with Metal Sonic attacking you. Then, he gets into a machine too high to reach requiring you to ricochet his minions into him (which can get quite frustrating if you keep missing). Then, you travel along another road with Metal Sonic attacking you. And THEN you fight him directly. Each of these parts is the length of a normal boss fight in most of the rest of the game.
• Spore: Did you forget to turn off your auto-blaster when meeting the Grox? Congratulations, you now have a Real Life month's worth of fighting to do to defeat them, because peace offerings don't work.
• The Sa-Matra in Star Control II. First you have to fight through a bunch of Ur Quan dreadnaughts before taking out all of the Sa-Matra's shields and then piloting a bomb into the Sa-Matra itself. And to make matters worse, the most effective strategy is to use Pkunk ships with only a weak, short range weapon.
• Star Fox:
  • The alternate Final Boss, the Slot Machine, can turn into this because of its nature as a Luck-Based Mission.
  • Many players will also cringe at the name Great Commander. Some may not, though, because they couldn't last through it and never learned its name. Six small hitboxes that are a nightmare to hit. And all of them need to be hit. And this fight is a Spiritual Predecessor to the All Range Mode segments found in later games, so it's also a gimmick fight.
• In Star Ocean: Till the End of Time:
  • Freya becomes an Optional Boss you can fight after completing the main game. She has 20 million HP (and that's just on easy mode!) and her attacks, namely Ether Strike, can kill even the highest leveled characters in one or two hits. To even have a tiny hope of winning, your team must be maxed out to level 255 and be equipped with the strongest weapons and accessories that can be found in the game. You must also have a whole inventory's worth of bombs, so that you can hopefully interrupt her attacks by blowing her up.
  • The Celestial Queen and Lenneth, while not even possessing a fraction of her power can drag on for an eternity. Raise Fayt's defense to the point that he takes zero damage from their attacks, and the fight still drags on for on the upper echelon of 45 minutes. Ridiculous doesn't even begin to describe Star Ocean: Till the End of Time's superbosses.
• In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, many story line bosses and superbosses can go on for an hour or more. The final boss has around 2 million HP on Galaxy (Normal) mode.
• Depending on your character build in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Malak can potentially become this. If you have no powers to take out the machines from which he drains captive Jedi, you're stuck whittling down his HP no fewer than nine times as he continues to heal himself. Keep in mind you've just fought through well over 100 enemies and so are possibly low on items, and on higher difficulties, his attacks can do around 80 points of damage — needless to say, you might be screwed.
• Luca Blight, from Suikoden II. You have three fights in a row against him (each time with 6 different characters), in which he may or may not kick everyone's behinds before proceeding to the next one. Depending on your teams, each battle can take up to 10 to 15 minutes each, though it should be noted that the first two battles will end early if your teams manage to do enough damage to him, and that if said teams do their job well the last one will be able to beat him rather quickly. On the other hand, if your first two teams don't manage to weaken him at all, the last one will have a very long battle on its hands, and it's not guaranted that Riou will be able to keep everyone alive until he's defeated because of his limited usage of the Bright Shield Rune. And after all that you get to run after a fleeing Blight, fight a few mooks, and finally you kill him... after a one on one duel in which he may OHKO you if you pick a single command wrong^note  During the Duel, you can see his life bar, showing how much life he has remaining after getting thrashed by 18 extremely powerful people: a quarter. He literally has more HP than all the rest of your 108 party members combined. You can't save between fights either. To this day, this fight remains the most challenging one of the entire series.
• Sun Haven has Krusty the Elemental. They are essentially a giant, angry, animated rock monster who wanders into the player's farm and proceeds to start causing severe seismic activity and rock falls. Though they have no means of offense and cannot move, Krusty has 6 digits at health at 100,000 when the penultimate story boss has '5'' digits at 90,0000 health. Thankfully, the Farmer can recruit two NPCs to help almost literally grind down this boss down.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Phantamanta from Super Mario Sunshine provides one of the longest boss battles in the Mario series for being an Asteroids Monster. It starts as a big, phantom-like manta ray, and can split into up to 64 smaller rays, which spread across the coast of Sirena Beach as they spill electric goo; this forces the player to both clean up the mess and eliminate the rays one by one.
  • Bonetail from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It has a grand total of 200 HP, which is 50 more than the final boss (both actually being big numbers in this game). It will prolong the fights by causing Confusion and healing itself for 20-30 HP per heal, amongst other things. Woe be you if it defeats you after you trekked down all 100 floors to get to it.
  • Culex from Super Mario RPG, with his four Crystals and a total of over 12,000 HP between the five (with Culex himself having the most). Though you can speed things up a little by focusing your attacks on Culex, that means you'll have to endure the bombardment from him and the Crystals. It's a long fight no matter how you approach it.
  • All of the final bosses in the Mario & Luigi series take a while. They all have various body parts that need to be destroyed before their weakpoint is exposed, and this weakpoint only stays around for a few turns. Dark Bowser and the Dark Star Core from Bowser's Inside Story deserve special mention since they are technically two final bosses in one, and repeating the first part is practically assured unless the Mario Bros. are really overleveled. Dreamy Bowser from Dream Team also deserves mention, as he heals a lot (and can't be attacked while doing so, as you have to defeat his Mooks first), which can stretch the final battle out for over an hour, especially on Hard mode.
  • All bosses in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story can become this if the Challenge Medal is equipped. The Challenge Medal increases health and defence by 50%; to put this in context, only one mandatory boss has over 2000HP in the vanilla game but the Challenge Medal means bosses from the middle of the game start to have this much HP.
  • The final fight with Bowser from Paper Mario: Sticker Star is definitely this and is considered one of the longest Bowser fights in the entire series. He technically has five different phases with the first four being puzzle fights. He has tons of HP, tons of attacks, and tons of tricks that have this fight take almost forever and all is this is AFTER a tough fight with Kamek. Fortunately, you can go back and heal and save after defeating Kamek and don't have to worry about fighting him again.
• Super Robot Wars games have a bad habit of this; not only will bosses have absurdly high health, they'll frequently have scripted events where getting their health low enough just makes them restore it completely. Even without that, bosses tend to have high health, strong defensive abilities, and MAP attacks to cut down your ranks to slow down your damage output.
  • The worst offenders are probably the Super Robot Wars: Original Generation games. In Original Generation 2, any boss worth mentioning is going to have over 100,000 HP, and the last few stages will have lots of them in a row. All of the last three stages (four if you face the True Final Boss) are going to have over a million HP's worth of bosses, and that doesn't even include Mooks' HP.
  • There are also the end bosses from Alpha Gaiden: Shu regens ALL his health 5 times.
  • The final boss of Alpha 3 has 620,000 health between its two phases, and droves of enemies present as well.
  • Super Robot Wars T's final fight has two bosses with 276,000 HP each, and Mooks are created every turn in escalating numbers - a Non-Standard Game Over is achieved if too many of them appear, so not only do you have to beat town the two bosses, but some units have to tackle the mooks to keep them from getting out of hand.
• Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U has the final battle at the end of Classic Mode, which just keeps adding on forms as the difficulty slider increases. At the highest difficulty required to fight the battle in its entirety (7.5 in the 3DS version and 6.0 in the Wii U version), the final battle has a whopping six (five for 3DS) phases. That's Master Hand/Crazy Hand and all of Master Core's forms: Master Giant, Master Beast, Master Edges, Master Shadow, and in the Wii U version, Master Fortress before the whole thing is through.
• Tales Series
  • The Superboss of Tales of Symphonia who unlocks your Infinity Plus One Swords, Abyssion, is also a Marathon Boss, featuring higher HP than the Final Boss and a more dangerous base of attacks. The recommended strategy for dealing with him is to use an "All-Divide," an item which halves all assigned damage and thus makes it even more of a marathon. The reason this is considered an improvement is that it does not change the effectiveness of your healing, essentially making those spells double-strength. Later ports of the game have the boss nullify All-Divides, making them pointless.
  • Another Tales Superboss, Nebilim from Tales of the Abyss, is basically the same, except that there's no All-Divide. Fortunately her damage output has been adjusted downward.
  • Any of the "giant monster" bosses from Abyss's Unknown Mode, especially Replicantis. The very first monster battle on Unknown usually takes about 15 minutes, just to get an idea.
  • A rare Tales Series example in which the Marathon Boss is not a Superboss: In Tales of Destiny 2, Fortuna, the Final Boss takes forever to beat. Look up videos of it on YouTube, and you'll notice that they're often split into multiple parts or have most of the fight edited out. The only indication that they're going down is that the music changes.
  • Magnadeus, the Superboss from the same game, can also take quite some time to defeat, though not usually as much time as Fortuna.
  • On higher difficulties, almost every single boss in Tales of Xillia ends up like this, due to how low the party's overall damage output is compared to other games in the series and the fact that bosses can escape from combos a lot more easily then in previous games. Only once one has fully powered up the Fell Arms and/or boosted their party's stats significantly with items do they go down in what could be considered a normal span of time.
• In the Team Fortress 2 mode Mann vs. Machine, several of the Giant Robots come across as this. Particular mention should go to the Black Box Giant Soldier, who not only has a huge amount of HP, but heals on hit. Not only do players have to drain his health, they have to avoid even getting hit. There are also other robots running around with the bomb, making it even more difficult.
• Both Orcus and General Akhboob from Total Carnage take quite a pounding before they go down. The game goes as far as to worn you that Orcus is "the mother of all boss monsters", and you can expect to spend over five minutes pumping rounds into him. Also, of the two, Akhboob is the only one with a health meter. And they're the only bosses of the game.
• Touhou Project:
  • Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom has Yukari Yakumo, who takes over 10 minutes to defeat, and over 15 minutes if you try to time out her attacks (say, to graze for score). Many shmups take about 20-30 minutes to complete, total. And to even get to Yukari, you have to beat the Extra boss Ran Yakumo. Twice. You see, Yukari's not PCB's Extra boss. She's the Phantasm boss. No other 'Touhou game has'' a Phantasm stage.
  • In general, every Extra boss in the Touhou series is relatively guilty of this. The only thing that really puts Yukari in a league of her own is her final card/attack, Danmaku Bounded Field. She's invincible during the whole thing, and it lasts for a minute and a half. Have fun. The timer for her last card stops any time you die or bomb until your invincibility wears off, unlike every other time-out card in the entire series. Have fun, indeed.
  • Typically, the last spellcard in any game is absurdly long. The average spellcard lasts about 15-20 seconds, 45 if you're going for the timeout. Final spellcards can last two and a half minutes. Kanako Yasaka's final card is particularly terrifying. Once again, Yukari takes the cake. Her optional Last Word spellcard in Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night is an extended version of the aforementioned last spellcard in PCB. Except you're not even allowed to bomb at all.
• Rinnosuke in Touhou Labyrinth. He has 7 different forms, can switch between the first 6 at will, and when he isn't using other forms, they actually regenerate HP. When added together, his collective HP more than triples that of the previous boss (Yukari) and her 3 forms.
• The titular enemy in Trillion: God of Destruction has, as you might expect, a trillion health. While each technical battle against it doesn't usually take very long compared to the grind, whittling it down is the focus of the entire game. It helps that the Overlords deal millions of damage per hit.
• The Big Bad Primagen in Turok 2: Seeds of Evil already has a ton of HP, and also has an annoying regeneration ability that can draw out the fight even longer.
• Undertale:
  • This could easily be a player's first encounter with Undyne if he/she is not informed (at least, on a Pacifist Run it could be.). The trick is to flee from her every time you turn back to red SOUL mode, but the only hint you get for this is a single text-box at the start of her fight.
  • A more literal example in the same game is Sans on a No Mercy run. The entire boss fight is meant to make you quit. On top of it, he literally dodges all of your attacks, making it impossible to hit him until he uses his special attack, which consists of absolutely nothing. He puts you in the bullet board, and tries to make his turn last as long as possible. The only way to beat him is to cheat by waiting for him to fall asleep, pushing the bullet board over to the fight button, and hitting it.
• In the Facebook game Viking Clan, world bosses are meant to be fought by thousands of players together (anyone can take part in the battle). The Phoenix, the weakest of these bosses (Level 10, apparently), has 26,343,750,000 health points. That's 26 billions. The battle is timed, lasting 14 days, and individual players must wait 4 hours between attacks. Fortunately, it's really just a question of length as it doesn't seem to heal and deals very little damage.
• Warframe
  • Lieutenant Lech Kril is coated in armor that is invincible to every single form of damage that the Tenno can inflict upon him. He can only be harmed when he slams his hammer into the ground, and only in four coolant tubes on his back. Without knowing this detail, the fight can go on forever.
  • Councilor Vay Hek Terra Frame can only be damaged by shooting his head, but this weak spot of his is absolutely tiny. He also repeatedly retracts his head behind an invincible mask when he takes more than a set amount of bullets (not damage) per cycle. This fight can last more than an hour unless the Paris Prime or Dread bows are used to get critical damage.
• Wild ARMs 3's final boss, Nega Filgaia, is a Sequential Boss with ten forms. Though most forms don't have much HP, they are puzzle bosses that come with gimmicks such as healing themselves, developing immunities to certain damage types, and summoning flunkies to take hits for them, which can draw out the fight even more. On top of that, the battle is preceded by two fights with Beatrice, separated by an overworld segment that doesn't allow the player to save - making this a twelve-stage fight!
• The final boss of The Wonderful 101, when considering the entire stage. Each individual phase isn't that long, but all together it takes about half an hour to beat him, and that's the Platinum time!
• World of Warcraft. Early Molten Core raids regularly spent an hour or so on the earlier bosses.
  • Kael'Thas Sunstrider from Tempest Keep is an excellent example from Burning Crusade. In his first phase, he sends his four minions at you one at a time. Then you fight magical moving weaponry for phase two. When those go down you you fight all four of the minions at once after he... had a soulstone on them or something. Phase four he finally attacks you. In phase five, he adds a couple neat tricks. He also talks for about ten minutes at the start, each of the mini bosses have their own line when they attack/die and there's a speech between every phase. Plus, after this there's Magister's Terrace because he was empowered by a demon lord. This weakened him into a five man where he continued to talk you to death. People literally lost the fight because they stopped paying attention during his speeches only to find out the fight had started.
  • General Rajaxx and co in Ahn'Qiraj will send waves of his mooks and Quirky Miniboss Squad before you fight him.
  • Every boss except Archimonde in Mount Hyjal, because you needed to kill eight waves of mooks before the boss even showed up. Fighting Illidan in Black Temple also takes around 15 minutes, when other bosses in the Black Temple take around three minutes each.
  • There's also Deathwing, the Big Bad of Cataclysm on heroic. You first have to actually get to him while his Mooks, which include a boss battle fight you on the way there, which may or may not count, then you fight him. He's two individual boss battles. First you have to kill all but 2 of the tentacles on his back, which start at 4, then get him to flip over, killing the Elite Mooks that spawn, then you kill the last tentacle, kite the mook around killing lesser mooks while whittling it's hp to 10% or so while pulling him over all the dead lesser mooks, to make him unstable, exploding and revealing the actual weak point which is then attacked, it takes 2 tries to kill, so now you take out his final tentacle and repeat the explosion part all over again. If you done all that, Congratulations! There are now six tentacles and you have to repeat it again, then one last time with eight. After that's all done, you have beaten the first boss battle with him. The second involves killing a large tentacle so it doesn't use it's Impale twice which deals Massive Damage, then killing his arm, which is clinging to the platform, which spawns waves of mooks that deal escalating damage once again forcing you to kill them, all while deathwing occasionally blasts you with a big rock that deals a chunk of damage, then constantly deals damage, forcing you to kill that. If you don't do all of this in short enough time, he finishes casting "Final Cataclysm" causing a Nonstandard Game Over. Done? Good! You lose one of the 4 buffs and have to do it 3 more times. THEN comes the final bit, where he spawns unending waves of mooks, and does damage to everyone based on how much hp he is missing.
  • Blizzard has gotten much better about this over time, to the point where most boss battles even in raids are supposed to finish in under 10 minutes, and if the players take longer, the Boss goes berserk and kills the raid in seconds. However, there are exceptions:
    • Encounters where you have to fight off a lot of mooks before the Boss even joins the fight (although the actual boss battle tends to be pretty short).
    • Final bosses in the longer raids are usually given longer, multi-phase fights, especially when its the Big Bad of the expansion like Deathwing as shown above.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X:
  • The game has Yggralith Zero and Telethia Plume, who are fought in online squad missions. It's not too challenging for a properly outfitted team to bring their health bar down to zero — but they each have several million health bars. At least you're not expected to finish them in one sitting, or finish them at all; beating one of these bosses is a worldwide event in which players from across the globe do what amounts to Scratch Damage on the boss in timed increments, in hopes that everyone's collective efforts will have the monster defeated before the event ends. The bad news? They recover hundreds of thousands of lifebars between event cycles. Each one has several hundred-thousand HP already, so multiply that by about 10 million, and that's the total HP these absurd beings have. That's easily in the trillions range, and probably more.
  • There is far tamer example outside of online: a Milesaur Tyrant named Gradivus, the Headless Emperor. It has one hundred million HP, the highest of any non-Global Nemesis enemy in the game despite being just level 74, but unlike the Global Nemeses mentioned above, you have to kill this one in a single sitting. There's ways to reduce that HP relatively fast with absurd builds, but it's a testament to its resilience that even the strongest builds in the game can't one shot it and take a while to bring it down.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The final boss has numerous phases that each have lots of health and also have unique situations (like Interlink abilities being disabled, Geo Effects, only having half of your main party, etc.) that make it difficult to do much damage.
• Bosses in the first two Ys games get most of their difficulty from this trope.
  • In Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen, you're evidently supposed to fight the final boss at level 24 (that being the Cap in the original PC-88 version and the remake), but walkthroughs for the TurboGrafx-16 version generally recommend level 40 so you're killing him by a method other than Death of a Thousand Cuts. It's a bit harder to tell what level you're supposed to be at for the second game's fights, but killing every Mook you see, then consistently hitting the boss with fully powered-up attacks, leaves you doing so little damage that you need to hit the bosses twice to even notice a change in their screen-spanning life bars.
  • Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter: Darm is a really long boss fight, even with your EXP maxed out. Then there's his teleport spamming and the constant rain of fireballs you must dodge.
  • Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys: Big Bad Arem has three lifebars (the last form fortunately is a Clipped-Wing Angel), a laundry list of powerful attacks, is hard to hit, your attacks only do minuscule damage even with max EXP, and he can regenerate his HP.

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Uses of this trope outside video games:

Anime & Manga

• In Chainsaw Man, when fighting the Eternity Devil it took three days of nonstop Cold-Blooded Torture from Denji to get it to keel over and die.
• Dragon Ball Z had a plethora of final bosses who were incredibly hard to kill, but the one who probably took the cake was Frieza, who even had a hope spot where they THOUGHT he was dead only to come back and kill Krillin. In the anime, the fight against Frieza took up 30 episodes, 22 of which were specifically Goku vs Frieza.
• One Piece
  • The upper echelons of the series' most powerful fighters are full of these. As a result, battles at this level tend to be marathon bosses fighting each other, and their battles are known to last multiple days. One of the first such battles shown in the series is Portgas D Ace, at the time an up and coming pirate, vs Jimbei, a Warlord of the Sea with ties to the pirate Emperor Whitebeard, which took place over five days before Whitebeard intervened personally and recruited Ace.
  • These battles can also be highly destructive. The island of Punk Hazard was host to a battle between Marine Admirals Akainu and Aokiji for the right to become Fleet Admiral. Their battle went on for ten days, turned Punk Hazard into Hailfire Peaks due to their respective magma and ice powers, and ended with Akainu the victor.
  • Jack, a commander of the Emperor, Kaido, fought the combined might of Zou fought for five days straight, trading between day and night shifts to offer Jack as little opportunity to rest as possible. Despite that, the fight could easily have taken much longer than even that had Jack not gotten impatient and had the place bombed with poison gas.
  • Luffy fights two of Big Mom's top commanders, the Sweet 3, and both fights take half a day or longer. His fight with Charlotte Cracker takes over eleven hours and he wins largely thanks to assists from Nami. Against Charlotte Katakuri, however, it's just the two of them one-on-one, and Katakuri shows himself to be more powerful and possess Combat Clairvoyance on top of that. That fight takes Luffy almost an entire day to finally win, and only manages it by the skin of his teeth.
  • The battle against Kaido in the third act of Wano when the Pirate-Ninja-Mink Alliance invades Onigashima is easily one of the longest fights in the entire series, and in the end it wasn't so much that Luffy overpowered Kaido as it was that Kaido had been fighting since the surprise attack started, and was the last major combatant on the side of the Animal Kingdom Pirates/Big Mom Pirates to go down - seemingly because his Villainous RRoD ran out. For reference, he took on the Nine Red Scabbards by himself and won handily, fought five members of the Worst Generation alongside Big Mom, then fought Luffy one on one after Luffy learned how to infuse his attacks with Conquerors Haki, and overpowered him anyways, fought his own son Yamato, then fought Luffy again and won again, temporarily killing him. It took Luffy Awakening his Devil Fruit to finally give him the chance to beat Kaido, and even after Luffy won, he spent a week unconscious due to all the damage he took.
• In one of the Sword Art Online novels, Kirito told Lizbeth of the time he participated in a raid against a floor boss that was fairly weak, but had so many hit points that it took them two days to kill. They had to fight it in shifts so that every squad in the raid party could get some sleep.
• In Yuusha Gojo Kumiai Kouryuugata Keijiban, Oracle Hero and his companions manage to defeat a god by hacking away at him nonstop for a whopping 3 years. It's a good thing that the god was nice enough to refrain from using his regenerative powers during the battle.

Films — Live-Action

• In Stardust, the final fight with Lamia and her sisters. First, Septimus fights Empusa and kills her. Second, Lamia kills Septimus. Third, Tristan sets the wolves on Mormo which kill her. At this point, the fight between Tristan and Lamia begins. Lamia, unable to use magic on Tristan due to his magic flower, throws stuff at him instead but he strikes her with lightning. Then she reanimates Septimus's corpse to fight Tristan, until he crushes it under a chandelier (though it takes three tries). Then she attacks with a knife, before releasing Yvaine, seemingly admitting defeat - but then reveals it to be a trick to eat Yvaine's heart in prime condition and attacks them a final time. Only now is Yvaine able to unleash an energy explosion, powered by her love for Tristan, which finally destroys the evil witch once and for all.

Franchise

• In Noob, the Source of Chaos, Horizon's Final Boss in early installments, is this. To top it off, one of the characters is famous for having beaten it on his own, which took even longer. The timeframe for the latter accomplishment is seven hours.

Live-Action TV

• In the video game-themed Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, the two secondary Riders Brave and Snipe finally settle their mutual score with Graphite to advance to the final boss of the real-life game they have to beat to stop the spread of the Bugster virus once and for all. Their 2-v-1 lasts from night all the way till the daytime until the two Riders finally scrape the win, though they don't deal the finishing blow, saving that for their ally, the only official player of the game, and therefore, the only one who can properly clear each boss.

Webcomics

• Problem Sleuth: The final boss fight with Demonhead Mobster Kingpin took up over half the comic, spawning an absurd number of fresh HP gauges at one point; being that the comic was a parody of Eastern RPGs, this was very likely an Affectionate Parody of the trope. Lampshaded by Problem Sleuth himself in his Strongly Worded Letter to the final boss.

Real Life

• Many of the animals early humans preyed upon before the invention of ranged weapons that allow us to safely kill them from a distance, particularly most Ice Age megafauna, and even some wildlife still preyed upon by a few select hunter-gatherer tribes today, require the hunters to constantly chase their prey for many hours until it is exhausted to the point that the prey can no longer escape.

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