Meet the Cunning God of Death.
- Ridley (pictured) is the Metroid equivalent to Death from Castlevania - a recurring boss that always makes you want to hurl a controller. To make him even more like Death, when he turned out to be a pushover in Metroid: Zero Mission, fans complained. He WAS hard in Super Metroid, though. Part of what makes him stand out is that while all other bosses have weak points that you can target and fairly predictable attack patterns, there is no trick to fighting Ridley other than to drop his HP to 0 before he does the same to you, and he has a lot more HP and attack strength than you do. And then there are Self Imposed Challenges. Low percent runs or even sequence breaking for the hell of it makes him hard as you have to dodge all his attacks and try to replenish your supply of missiles with a beam that only goes a few pixels.
- Metroid II: Return of Samus has three distinct Gamma Metroids, which are normally Wake Up Call Bosses at best, which are instead infamously tricky thanks to difficult terrain:
- One is found in sand, where it can move freely while you can't. You only have a narrow corridor and must chew open a hole to engage the thing, while it repeatedly comes in from above and below to land hits. Since there's not enough room to jump and easily dig down, you must first shoot up to make jumping room or use the infamously slow bombs... while this thing is hitting you every step of the way. To make matters worse, any cleared-out sand respawns the second its empty space goes off-screen.
- Another is encountered in a long shaft with a false floor on the bottom. You must use your newly acquired Space Jump, which unlike later games has very tricky timing, to come up through the false floor and fight it. Some blocks aren't false and will block you, one hit from this thing sends you falling right back down, and it's often difficult to stay up long enough to land hits.
- Another takes part in a narrow room filled with roots which, like the sand above, it can move freely through while you can't. Even without the roots this would be one of the trickier Gammas to fight, so expect to take a good beating until you've cleared out enough roots to effectively engage it. Made worse by how you fight this one almost immediately after fighting an Alpha Metroid in similar terrain meaning, unless you leave and do some grinding, you're not even likely to be at full health and ammo.
- Metroid Prime's Meta Ridley had a cruel bait-and-switch version of this. He starts out almost hilariously anticlimactic, flying around your platform and throwing bombs, missiles, and lasers at you, all of which are easy to dodge. Then, you get him down to about a fifth of his health, and his wings burn off. He lands and goes into melee mode, where he lunges at you and takes off huge amounts of health with every hit. He also gets much harder to damage, and has to be stunned before he exposes his weak spot.
- Metroid Fusion:
- The (aptly named) Nightmare, a Damage-Sponge Boss about as tall as the screen. It wields annoying Gravity Screw powers that not only causes your missiles to fall to the ground The Great Dictator-style at first, but after it Turns Red may also cause your Game Boy Advance to get flung across the room, in part due to its immense size making it nigh-impossile to dodge when it flies around the arena erratically, and in part due to its tiny hitbox.
- There's also the BOX Security Robot. Both times you fight it, you have to hang from monkeybars on the ceiling and shoot down into its core, which is easier said than done. It can't be hit when it attacks, and its attacks are all designed to knock you off the ceiling to get trampled by the thing. Just to add to it, the second fight takes place above a pool of electrified water, which knocks your health off very quickly.
- Yakuza the Kung-Fu Spider. Its first form zigzags across the boss room, trying to grab you; if it grabs you, it'll suplex you for staggering amounts of damage. Thankfully, if you wiggle enough you can sometimes break away before suplex-spider makes you into a pancake. It's only vulnerable at certain times (namely, when it spits fireballs). After you blast its legs off, it gets much easier, since it loses the suplex attack and armored hide, is easier to damage, and only spits weak projectile attacks.
- The final showdown with SA-X? It's a fight against an exact duplicate of your character that attacks relentlessly with all of your devastating special weapons — except that it can take a lot more damage and has the superior dexterity of a computer. Winning this encounter comes out to learning how to screw with the AI.
- After almost all bosses, you'll also have to break open a Core-X before you can claim your shiny new prize. Normal Core-X aren't too bad, but Beam Core-X fire the beam they hold at you every time you damage them as well as slowly-but-steadily home in you like a slow-moving heat-seeking missile without any of the sporadic movements that normal Core-X have to damage you via touch. The aforementioned SA-X holds the Ice Beam Core-X. Have fun.
- Near the end of Metroid: Zero Mission, you fight one of the last remaining Chozo artifacts while in Zero Suit (read: don't have your power suit or any of your advanced weaponry). To defeat it, you need to shoot it four times when it's vulnerable. At any time when it's not vulnerable, it will show mirrored image of Samus, and shooting it will cause her to take damage instead. Sounds simple, right? Don't get used to it. Once you've lowered its health a bit, it will float around the room in increasingly erratic patterns, hoping to do you in via Collision Damage. It also drops lightning bolts that crawl across the floor and ceiling. So, the final score? It flies around randomly, it hurts to shoot it sometimes, and it makes the environment you face it in lethal. And on Hard difficulty, the difficulty spikes considerably: the boss itself and its movements don't change, but because Hard Mode halves the total amount of energy you can pick up (energy tanks now only give you half a full unit apiece) and raises the damage that enemies do, you have a maximum of four and a half full tanks at this point in the game and the boss now does a full energy tank with every hit. Luck will be a factor in your success.
- Metroid Prime:
- The Hive Mecha is something of a Wake-Up Call Boss or Noob Bridge. New players who don't pay attention to the HUD's radar will be quickly frustrated by the difficult-to-hit War Wasps constantly knocking them into the poison water around the platform, both dealing damage and disorienting them. The Hive Mecha itself has a very small window to inflict damage, and it's hard to tell if you're even hurting it due to there being no health bar. It gets even worse in Hypermode, as you take tons of damage and your aim has to be on point if you want to survive. You'd think the aim problem would be better on the Wii versions but... not really.
- The Omega Pirate is a massive Elite Pirate found at the bottom of the Phazon Mines. For starters, the room has several pools of Phazon in it that are extremely easy to accidentally walk into when you're trying to avoid the Omega Pirate. He's also good at backing players into corners and smacking them for ridiculous amounts of damage, and while you can stun him with Power Bombs, it's hard to get away without losing a lot of health. Even worse, he spends most of the fight with a shield up that blocks all weapons except Missiles (and the Flamethrower). Damaging him requires you to jump through a bunch of hoops; first, you blast off his shoulder and knee armor, then he vanishes and summons several Beam Troopers. As you fight the Troopers, you have to listen for the sound cue that tells you when he reappears in one of the Phazon pools, which allows you to hit the heart, the only place he can be damaged. On Normal, this is all fairly manageable, but he's a nightmare on Hard. Quite aside from his boosted damage and massive health bar, the Troopers that he summons become a major threat, especially the Wave Troopers.
- Part of why Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is so hard to survive involves abusive bosses; the Boost and Spider Ball Guardians both hold the position of That One Boss for different reasons. In fact, when Metroid Prime 2 was ported to the Wii, they were the only two bosses who were made easier.note The lead designer said
this was his way to atone for a last minute decision that he'd instantly regret - "Tanabe-san really fought for it, 'we need to make it tighter', and we were like 'no it's already too tight'. We made it tighter and it turned out to be too tight, right?"- The Boost Guardian fight takes place on Dark Aether, without a safe zone, which means constant, steady damage. The fight takes place in a tiny confined little room. Every so often, the Guardian will shift into a little sphere and rocket around for far too long, careening into Samus with alarming frequency and accuracy. It's completely up to luck however often he hits you. You can go the fight, not get hit once, and then get ripped apart when you've got him down to a quarter health. In addition, it's possible to come out of the fight with too little health to get to a safe zone. It's unlikely, but there's nothing more soul-crushing than having to go through that fight twice. And U-Mos help you if you attempt to fight the Boost Guardian on a No Dark Suit Run. The game gives you some Boss Arena Recovery in the form of four little pillars that yield 100 energy when destroyed. The problem is that only the Boost Guardian's ball form can destroy them. Sometimes, it'll refuse to touch them when you're down to twenty units of energy and about to die, other times it'll smash all four of them in the first five minutes of the fight and deny you recovery. Also, the destroyed pillars spawn Inglets infinitely.
- The Spider Ball Guardian is a nasty, confusing Puzzle Boss. The battle is done in Morph Ball mode and involves setting traps for the guardian. The problem is, several of the traps are nearly impossible to reach without minute precision. In addition, a design oversight makes the final area of the fight much more difficult than it should be; several of the Bomb Slots you need to activate are located at the top of slight rises, meaning it's very easy to overshoot the mark, wasting the small window of time you have to activate all three.
- While typically not quite as difficult as the Boost Guardian or the Spider Guardian, the Power Bomb Guardian can be pretty frustrating. To beat the boss, the player needs to crawl up a maze of Spider Ball tracks to activate four different bomb slots. After activating one, Samus falls down and has to climb up again, and all the while the boss is shooting Power Bombs at you and Inglets are spawning everywhere shooting globs of darkness at the player, both of which will damage and cause Samus to fall. It is only possible to climb the rails in the Morph Ball, so any gamer will be defenseless against the Inglets unless he or she can coax them into the range of one of the boss's Power Bombs. And the Power Bomb Guardian will often throw power bombs in front of Samus' path, giving her only enough time to roll away before being hit. Forget trying to avoid them if you're on a small strip of magnetic rail.
- And then there's Emperor Ing, the brutal three-form final boss fight.note His first form is a massive, immobile creature in the middle of the room that attacks with his tentacles. Destroying the tentacles exposes the eye, the Emperor's weak point. The second form is a cocoon you have to attach to with the Spider Ball and roll all over to bomb its weak points. This form is kind of a breather, since Emperor Ing only has one easily dodged attack. There's also Inglets crawling all over it, which can be killed for pickups. Finally, you have the third form, a gigantic Warrior Ing. He jumps around like a flea, makes huge shockwaves, fires beams everywhere, and gives virtually no opportunities to regain lost health unless you run low on ammo. He's also yet another Barrier Change Boss, constantly swapping his weakness between light and dark, and requiring you to use the Power Beam to render him vulnerable at all. Good luck trying to hit him with the Dark Beam, as its shots don't home in when locked on and most of the time they'll harmlessly bounce off because he's moving so much. At least the Annihilator Beam damages him regardless of light or dark weakness and easily homes in on him, but it eats up a lot of precious ammo.
- Alpha Blogg. On Normal, this fight is tricky, but doable; if you have enough energy tanks, then once he Turns Red and gets faster, you can tank his attacks and attrition him to death. On Hard, however, turning it into a war of attrition will get you killed; you have to be able to damage and dodge him consistently, even when he gets really fast.
- The Alpha Splinter is the Hive Mecha equivalent of Prime 2. His jumps come extremely quickly, are hard to dodge and take off copious amounts of health - and he comes before Samus can find any energy tanks or missile expansions. Ironically, he gets easier when he Turns Red and becomes the Dark Alpha Splinter.
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, despite being much more forgiving than its predecessor, still has some difficult bosses:
- Gandrayda. Whenever she hasn't taken on the forms of previous bosses/enemies, she jumps around so fast and so much that it's nigh-impossible to reliably hit her; she also tosses explosive energy projectiles and can and will try to jump on you, draining valuable health unless you can quickly shake her off. The first half of the battle is easy, the third quarter is more challenging but still okay, but in the last quarter she abandons the shape-shifting completely, making her extremely difficult to hit, alternates between invisible (which requires you to change visor) and hypermode (which jams the visor and forces you to go hypermode yourself to damage the boss, which can become a problem if your health is already getting low), and it's very possible to accidentally step into the highly damaging acid rain. Also, the only way to regain health is in the first phase.
- Rundas will speed around the arena while semi airborne, where it's very difficult to hit him with your slow shots and the giant ice pillars he sets up specifically to give himself cover. He also packs highly damaging ice attacks that can freeze you. His hyper mode makes him even faster and can lead to an attack where he swings around a giant icicle like a flail and throws it at you, which highly damaging, capable of tearing off energy tanks at a time unless you attack him enough times or hard enough in the short period before he throws it. And to make things worse, you will most likely only have about 3 Energy Tanks at this point.
- Dark Samus is a fairly tough final opponent on Normal. On Hypermode? She's unabashedly sadistic. It mostly has to do with the health system you use during the battle, which essentially acts as a combo timer/hit counter, but her attacks are still a pain to dodge and she loves to spam them.
- The Slench in Metroid Prime: Hunters. Not only are they hard as snot to hit when their giant eyes start flying around, but killing all of their tentacles in order to damage them in the first place is frequently an ordeal in and of itself. The worst thing of all that the eye is moving so fast, and only the pupil will take damage, and you don't have any targeting system to lock on it. It gets even worse when you reach the Slench v3.0, which is positioned at a very awkward angle, and the Slench v4.0, which is on the ceiling and starts rolling after you when you kill all its tentacles. After defeating it it's advisable to take a long rest. (To make matters worse you have a timer after each boss battle... at least it creates a checkpoint after you defeat the boss so you're not forced to kill it again.)
- Metroid: Other M:
- As you're facing it down, the Metroid Queen will spawn a normal Metroid; the only way to kill said Metroid is to shoot it with a charge shot to freeze it, and then aim at it (pointing the Wii remote at the screen and being locked into a stationary first-person perspective) while you charge up and fire a super missile at it. Not a problem until the she starts hemorrhaging so many Metroids that it becomes impossible to freeze some Metroids and charge up a super missile without getting snagged by other Metroids, unless you freeze ALL of them before the first one you froze in the sequence wakes up. This gets easier if you know you can use the 1 button to hold onto a charge when going into visor mode, but still. There's no special tactic, just using sense-move at the last second, firing at the clusters and hoping to god your energy doesn't get too low, because if it does, you're fucked, considering you won't have time in this battle to use Concentration before a Metroid head-rapes you. Then in the second phase, it tosses out heavy-hitting attacks that are almost impossible to dodge. And then the third phase makes you use a technique that you haven't been allowed to use (and don't even know you can use) since the opening tutorial eight hours previous, within five seconds or you die. Joy.
- There's the Rhedogian (that flying anomalocaris thing), which you have to fight four (six if you count the mini-boss rush after the end) times. He's really freakin' fast, dodges nearly anything, does heavy damage, has hard-to-dodge attacks, and is invincible most of the time. Also, the first two times you fight it, you have barely any room to maneuver around, and the second time you can get a Nonstandard Game Over if you take too long (read: don't know what to do) before getting to him. The second battle is probably the worst, as you're stuck in a very confined space with him, so he becomes really difficult to dodge. On Hard, your success depends on when he will try to shoot a giant laser at you. Thankfully, after the third time around you get the Screw Attack, which makes him significantly easier.
- Goyagma, in a Wake-Up Call Boss sense. Faced just after a hellish sequence without the Varia suit, Goyagma is easy enough to hit and damage, but his attacks are very unpredictable. He has long arms which he slices across the platform you're on. Sometimes, he'll do it twice. Unfortunately, it can be very hard to tell when to jump as sometimes he swipes slow and sometimes fast, with little to no indication and so you may jump too early or too late. Later in the battle, one of his attacks is a constant hand smash to avoid - but it also forms a mini-eruption where you're at, so you have to get ready to dodge that quickly too. Near the very end, he will do the mini-eruption, THEN very quickly follow up with a fast swipe, which is hard to dodge. In Hard mode, each of these attacks do 1/3 damage. So that's 1/3 for each mistake, and it's hard to predict against.
- The RB176 Ferrocrusher on Hard. Its speed is absolutely insane, and it hits like a sledgehammer. It has a laser which causes explosions wherever it fires. It will grab you with its arms and drill you into the wall if you even get close to it. Its charges are very difficult to dodge, and take off massive chunks of your health. Down to the last of your health and need to heal? Too bad, you won't even get a chance until you survive its second phase long enough to freeze its wheels.
- Remember the Nightmare? It's back, alright, and still just as nasty. Most of the fight takes place in high gravity, which makes you run at a snail's pace, makes your missiles worthless, and you're stuck on the ground for a few moments after landing from a jump; all while Nightmare is spamming energy projectiles and giant lasers from its arms. It's also invincible until you disable its gravity manipulator (thankfully your shots home in on it), since you can't hit it with missiles in high gravity. Once you've dealt some damage to it, it may start sliding or walking along the ground, which, if the gravity is on, requires you to jump to a lower level to avoid it. Thankfully its second form is pitifully weak (you're immune to high gravity, it can only shoot painfully slow energy balls and form gravity wells, and sometimes it just lays there on the ground).
- Some of the bosses in Metroid: Samus Returns will make you wish you were playing a different game in short order. None of them will go by swiftly, and their attacks can shave off over half an Energy Tank at minimum.
- The Omega Metroids are a risky slog in miniboss form, especially the first one after a Zeta Metroid softens you up. Unlike in prior games, and unlike prior Metroid forms, this one grows a crest over its squishy weakpoint, which must be hammered down by Missiles or Ice Beam shots note . It gives very few opportunities to attack its weak point, none of which involve it not trying to hurt you, and its one counterable attack does not come out until its crest is broken. On top of dropping rocks from the ceiling on you, sometimes doing so while it's frying the floor with its heat beam, its lengthy melee attacks, its ability to leap across the room, and nothing resembling safe shelter from its attacks, grab a Snickers before showtime, 'cause you're not going anywhere for a while.
- The Diggernaut's drill arms were a One-Hit Kill when it was chasing Samus earlier, and in the boss fight they still knock off 150 Energy on Normal difficulty. It can sweep them along the ground, slam them into it to send out shockwaves, and drill into the ceiling to drop gobs of toxic goo onto your head. Its head can fire lasers out both sides, fire laser beams to carve up Samus from the background, and suck up loose debris (and Samus, to the tune of 300 damage). Worse, it has no counterable attacks, the player must be proactive in tearing it apart, and all recovery options cease once both arms are destroyed. The player will likely sympathize with Samus after the fight by the time all is said and done.
- The Metroid Queen has absolutely no recovery options outside of phase changes, meaning that reckless use of missiles will leave you with only the Ice Beam to win the day with. It can litter the field with energy globules which hurt like hell, fire its laser along every surface available, roar with enough force to push Samus towards the searing wall, swing its head around to hurt Samus, or some combination of the prior, and it cannot be hurt unless it is spitting something out. On top of that, its only counterable attack only comes between phase changes, meaning you only have two chances to get some free damage in, whether by Super Missiles or by Power Bombs. This fight is ugly as all hell no matter how you look at it, so take it with all due seriousness or expect to see the Game Over screen a lot.
- Metroid Dread was made by the same people who did the abovementioned Samus Returns; for that reason, expect the bosses to violate you to the tune of whole Energy Tanks per hit if you don't take them seriously. Some of them stand out even in that regard, whether it's an E.M.M.I. or not.
- Kraid's the point where the game snaps off the training wheels with extreme prejudice. He starts the fight spewing garbage from his mouth and flinging nails at you, which is decent enough, but before long he slams the platform towards the magma and everything goes to hell. At that point, you can't take cheap shots at his eyes and mouth anymore, and his infected belly button spews its own garbage on top of the spikes jamming into the walls as temporary platforms. The one place where you have a clean shot at his eyes and mouth is also prone to attack from all sides, and the occasional melee attack is meant to dislodge you. Hope you weren't planning on going anywhere for a while. note
- If Kraid didn't get your blood pumping, E.M.M.I.-04SB definitely will. Don't bother outrunning it; it's got the Speed Booster, and while this means it has to slow down when it's not moving in a straight line, this also means you better have a steady aim if you want to blow its face plate off, lest it catch up and skewer you. Also, there are rooms with water on the way through, and you don't have the Gravity Suit. Fun times.
- The Robot Chozo Soldier that murdered Quiet Robe is eager, and capable, of making you join him. Its shots are fast and precise, if not explosive, and it randomizes the timing on scraping its laser blade along the ground, meaning you can't afford to dawdle in getting away from it. Counter opportunities are rare, and you need to plaster this thing with as many Diffusion Beam and Missile rounds as you can spare. May the Thoha help you in Upper Ferenia where you have to handle a showdown with two of the mechanical bastards.
- On your way through Burenia after Quiet Robe opens the way, you'll have to face off against Drogyga. It looks like a giant butthole, and is just as pleasant. The entire fight takes place underwater so it moves at a snails pace with limited jumping and dodging control — when you get hit by an attack you saw it coming seconds in advance and knew it was too late to dodge the entire time, and it hits like a dump truck so you'll die pretty quickly on your first few attempts before you even know what to do. The entire fight runs on trial and error so you have to slog through it over and over, dying and continuing and restarting from the beginning, until you figure out what exact finicky steps need to be taken to bring it down, and halfway through it throws in a sudden new attack that can only be dodged by quickly grappling to the ceiling. And, to add insult to injury, you don't even get a new powerup or any upgrades for beating it — you get nothing, good day sir, and just continue on your way after having lost about 20 minutes of your life.
- E.M.M.I.-05IM is worse than its predecessor in that it has one distinctive feature: freezing vision. If it so much as sees Samus at a longer range than usual, Samus will be frozen solid thanks to her Metroid DNA; the minor damage over time is insignificant compared to the space you will lose as a result, so if you think it'll spot you, hope you're close to an exit or have the Phantom Cloak, otherwise you're going to have problems. Also, there's water in some areas, just as a reminder. Have fun.
- Experiment No. Z-57 is where the bosses get particularly spicy. It can spew high-pressure acidic goo from its mouth that temporarily saturates the floor, slash at you with its tentacles and try to bite you after a grounded spray; even if you get the counter off, this thing is a damage sponge of the highest order. The second phase is worse, as it tries to recover while blasting you from afar and basically spews enough caustic crap with such force that you essentially have to play Flappy Bird to avoid getting hit. note
- E.M.M.I.-06WB is just the worst of its kind. Its Wave Beam shots are slow, but can stun you if they hit, which lets it close space easily. That's not the worst part: it has 05IM's visual detection range, except instead of freezing Samus on sight, it can see through walls. Even then, it can hear you no matter where you are in its zone. Better hope your E.M.M.I. game and Grapple Beam skills are on point, because you're going no further otherwise. note
