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Worst/Most Difficult boss you ever fought?

Xeaker

Member
Hardest boss Elizabeth or Fiend Genshin on Master Ninja

LmpwZw

LmpwZw
 

Melchiah

Member
Bloodborne:
Pthumerian Descendant in the Great Pthumeru Ihyll Chalice. Took me more tries than anything else in the game, including all the bosses in the Defiled Chalice and Orphan of Kos (NG+ included).

Dark Souls 3:
Champion Gundyr. A pain in the ass even with the help of NPC.

Let It Die:
V4 Jackals above floor 100, particularly Jackal X. The real kicker is, that if you fail you'll be transported back to the base, and have to climb back all the way from floor 52 to try again, which takes at least 2-3 hours. Those few minute routes back to the bosses in Souls games are nothing in comparison.
 
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Mephisto40

Member
I remember Shao Kahn on the original Mortal Kombat 2 arcade machine being practically impossible, mainly because it cheats and reads your moves
 
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kraspkibble

Permabanned.
maybe not the worst but bullshit. Okumara in Persona 5 Royal.

perfectly fine fight in the original game...almost forgettable in fact but in Royal they decided to fuck around with it. They didn't necessarily make it more difficult by making him more powerful or giving him extra attacks. It forces you to use certain attacks/items to target the weakness in order to stack attacks. You have to fight him by constantly striking his weakness. If your Personas don't have a certain type of attack or you don't have the items then you're pretty much fucked.

I spent hours trying to fight him and even used some of the "broken" "OP" DLC persona and still couldn't beat him with brute strength. I almost gave up on the game but decided to cave to the game and play the way it wanted me to.
 
The Tales series has its fair share of tough bonus bosses. The ones that came to my mind first:
  • the exhibition match in Tales of Eternia... in Hard mode... having to fight Cless and Arche at the same time with only a single character. Even 1v1 in the lower difficulties, this is easily the hardest fight in the game.
  • Abyssion in Tales of Symphonia. You can cheese the fight even at low level using poison (which is random and very unreliable even at 250+ luck), but at the higher difficulties he spams Mystic Artes and Stop Flow, and starts raining down meteors on your party when his health gets too low. Also, in all versions but the first one on the NGC, he is immune to All-Divide, and immune to Unison Attacks hen below half health.
  • The Spiral Draco in Tales of Vesperia. The boss itself is in 6 parts which attack individually from each other, flooding the entire arena in spells; the "main" part, the central head can only be reliably damaged when you have destroyed the body, which gets quickly resurrected by the head leaving you with little time to attack. Did I mention each individual part had almost as much health as the final boss (and different elemental resistances/weaknesses), and the head itself twice as much? It also can, and will, drain your entire Overlimit gauge at least once. Also also takes only 1 damage from your ultimate weapons, leaving you with the second best ones - some of which have elements you definitely don't want to use against him.
 
Gears of War Ultimate Edition Brumak fight on highest difficulty. Terrible boss battle. Your team mate provides zero help, so you basically have to tank the enemy in 20 tries because it's nearly impossible.

Huh, interesting.... most of the shooting game bosses I've seen, the player's first instinct is to go for the body. But for this boss I guess you have to take out its peripheral weapons first.
 
I remember Shao Kahn on the original Mortal Kombat 2 arcade machine being practically impossible, mainly because it cheats and reads your moves
I mean, yeah... starting with MK2 (I think), the AI is just pure bullshit. Straight up reading your inputs and reacting with superhuman priority and times for their moves.

This was posted in a different thread here on NeoGAF a couple of weeks ago. But, as a reminder:



It has to be this

tvkjqelky3l61.jpg

This looks to be from some... Castlevania game? Maybe one of the DS ones?
 

Sentenza

Member
It may be shocking to you, but there are plenty of video game series other than Souls.
How is that of ANY fucking relevance?
You are still failing to identify one of the most recognizable characters from the most successful (and talked about) game released this year.
 

cireza

Banned
I think that Ninja Gaiden Razor Edge has some of the most difficult bosses in all the games I have played.
 
How is that of ANY fucking relevance?
You are still failing to identify one of the most recognizable characters from the most successful (and talked about) game released this year.
Cool story, bro.

Also, chill 😂. Because at the end of the day, the only irrelevant thing here is your childish temper tantrum.
 

Sentenza

Member
Cool story, bro.

Also, chill 😂. Because at the end of the day, the only irrelevant thing here is your childish temper tantrum.
Yeah, yeah. Sure. "Temper tantrum" for calling you out on coming up with an idiotic rebuttal.
Who are you even trying to fool here?
 
Yeah, yeah. Sure. "Temper tantrum" for calling you out on coming up with an idiotic rebuttal.
Who are you even trying to fool here?
No one, because I have better shit to do. But speaking of "fool"... Not only are you one, but evidently you have anger issues, too. I recommend talking to someone about those 😂

Think about it: you sound really, really angry about some random person on the Internet not knowing who a video game character is, from just the picture. Time to reconsider your life choices, bud

And unless you're going to contribute to the actual thread topic, I'm done with you. Go be angry and immature at somebody else, I ain't got time for that.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Shit, man... Cuphead is one of the games in my backlog.

I see some boss frustration in my near future 😂
I'd probably do better if I stuck with it. But in modern day with so many games, I just moved on. There is an easy mode, but didn't want to play that mode to progress. Googling it, it says you cant beat the game and face the final bosses unless you beat it on normal mode.
 
I'd probably do better if I stuck with it. But in modern day with so many games, I just moved on. There is an easy mode, but didn't want to play that mode to progress. Googling it, it says you cant beat the game and face the final bosses unless you beat it on normal mode.
Yeah that's fair.

It's funny... when we were all kids, we didn't mind retrying a level or boss as many times as necessary to beat it. Because we had a lot of free time, but also not many games. So we squeezed every single dollar out of every game we bought.

But now as adults, it's an opposite problem: a shit ton of games, and no time to play them. So the incentive/motivation to retry a boss or level a trillion times.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Yeah that's fair.

It's funny... when we were all kids, we didn't mind retrying a level or boss as many times as necessary to beat it. Because we had a lot of free time, but also not many games. So we squeezed every single dollar out of every game we bought.

But now as adults, it's an opposite problem: a shit ton of games, and no time to play them. So the incentive/motivation to retry a boss or level a trillion times.
My bro and I beats Wizardry 7. Good game with a clunky UI. But near the end of the game are optional bosses to kill called House of Gorrors or whatever. Harder than the final boss.

The battles took a while as it was turn based combat, but most of the fights were hard as fuck where you'd be guaranteed to lose half your party. Some like Beast of 1000 Eyes would wipe out our parties until hours later where we'd survive with 1 or 2 characters retrying endless times.

If it was modern day, I would had quit fast.

(Although reading up on it, it was one of things where our characters werent leveled up high enough though we plowed our way to end game. These bosses are supposed to be much easier if we leveled up a bit more, but thats the nature of rigid turn based stat combat)
 
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Ailynn

Faith - Hope - Love
Watched about 15 minutes of this video.

My question to you is... Have you been able to beat this "Any Radiance" boss? 😂

I haven't gotten around to playing Hollow Knight yet (it's in my Steam backlog of stuff to play), but this reminds me of those super crazy Mario Maker levels... On steroids.

Ohhh no, not a chance- Beating the non-modded versions of Radiance were annoying enough! :lollipop_grinning_sweat:

Don't let that video scare you away from Hollow Knight. It's an amazing game that can be very tough, but fair.


As for the hardest boss I've fought and beaten, I'd say that would probably have to be Malenia from Elden Ring...although even she eventually became pretty easy after level-grinding for several...days. :lollipop_tongue:

ktyX1tW.jpg
 
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Melchiah

Member
Yeah that's fair.

It's funny... when we were all kids, we didn't mind retrying a level or boss as many times as necessary to beat it. Because we had a lot of free time, but also not many games. So we squeezed every single dollar out of every game we bought.

But now as adults, it's an opposite problem: a shit ton of games, and no time to play them. So the incentive/motivation to retry a boss or level a trillion times.

Exactly the opposite for me. As a kid I didn't have the patience for the arcade-rooted difficulty of C64/Amiga games, but now as an adult I enjoy the challenge, and platinuming games like Bloodborne and Resogun.

And we actually had more games to play back in C64/Amiga days due to how easy it was to exchange games with friends. Hell, when I got a secondhand C64, it came with hundreds of games. That's why games felt like fast food back then, and held no value for me unlike now. I tend to play a handful of games per year these days, and sink my teeth deep into them. No point in wasting time on something I don't enjoy, eventhough it might come "free" with a service, like the vast majority of open world games.
 
You could fill this entire thread with arcade final bosses but this motherfucker takes the cake

J6pAJ9.jpg
Great post in general.

This picture only shows one, but don't you have TWO Shredders in this fight?

Since we're on the topic, what other arcade bosses deserve "honorable mentions" in your view?

Yeah I never got the love for Jeanne's fights. They're spectacular and impressive but she doesn't seem to have patterns or telegraphs like most bosses do. She doesn't offer clear windows to exploit or punish. She just dashes around randomly spamming stuff and runs face-first into your own Wicked Weave spam. Beating her is just an ordeal of constantly dodge-offsetting at a distance and hoping she falls for your longest range attacks. Great game, great character, ok boss.
Perfect description, and much more concise than my post. Agree on all fronts.

I know it's Bayonetta's game, and I like the character just fine, but I ended up liking Jeanne as a character a lot more. And the fights, especially the final one, do have some redeeming qualities. The music is totally epic. The set pieces are cool if you're only an observer. And Jeanne -- much more than any boss in the game -- truly tests your skills as a player.

But, taking inspiration from your description, if I had to distill the Jeanne boss fights to a single sentence, I would say they consist of "Jeanne unpredictably spamming high-priority, super-fast moves with no warning, in set pieces that give you bad visibility."
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
Difficult to say. As much as I struggled with some bosses in Souls and other modern games, if I could relive my experiences with NES games from my youth, I guess any Souls boss would feel like a cakewalk compared to bosses from Castlevania, Megaman, TMNT, Zelda 2 etc. Bosses in classic space shooters are also much harder on average than bosses from action games, except you have lives and continues so they feel easier. The fourth, fifth and final boss from Ikaruga are way worse than O&S if you’re going for 1cc.

In recent times, I may have ragequit at Genichiro and some other similar stuff, but I seriously think some fights in Smash Ultimate’s story mode are several times harder that FS bosses.
 
Ohhh no, not a chance- Beating the non-modded versions of Radiance were annoying enough! :lollipop_grinning_sweat:
But wait .. this means you actually beat the (non -modded) Radiance, then?

Today I learned that Ailynn Ailynn is a hardcore Hollow Knight player 😂👍🏾

Don't let that video scare you away from Hollow Knight. It's an amazing game that can be very tough, but fair.
Like we used to say as kids where I come from: "Nah girl, I ain't scared." 😂 I love challenging games. Especially when they're fair and reward you for mastering advance techniques or knowing the level/bosses well.

As for the hardest boss I've fought and beaten, I'd say that would probably have to be Malenia from Elden Ring...although even she eventually became pretty easy after level-grinding for several...days. :lollipop_tongue:

ktyX1tW.jpg
I think a couple of people posted this earlier in the thread. I won't look up videos because whenever I do get around to Elden Ring I want to go in fresh and devise my own strategy (and, despite what some haters want to think, no, I don't always play all the latest games right away. I haven't even truly gotten going with Dark Souls 1!!)
 

Bragr

Banned
Nah, Shadow Link has no personality and exists for the purposes of one dungeon. You need sass and story relevance for a good rival archetype.

He's a doppelganger / guardian of the threshold / inner demon kind of deal at best.
I didn't have a point with that image, but since Kamiya was obsessed with Zelda around that time, and some ideas from Zelda went into his games, it made me think of Dark Link.

Retro also infused this into Metroid Prime, which is probably some homage to Dark Link. Fighting what is similar to yourself.

I'm not saying there is any connection to Dark Link to Kamiya or anything you said or anything, just a loose trivia connection.
 

Neff

Member
This picture only shows one, but don't you have TWO Shredders in this fight?

Yep, he continuously generates fake clones of himself, will instantly counter you for big damage if you're in front of him for more than a couple of frames, and that 3-way laser kills you instantly. He can drain coins from you like few bosses can if you don't know what you're doing.

if I had to distill the Jeanne boss fights to a single sentence, I would say they consist of "Jeanne unpredictably spamming high-priority, super-fast moves with no warning, in set pieces that give you bad visibility."

That's basically it. I don't know why they designed her like that, maybe it's something to do with the fact that both you and Jeanne move so fast and have such massive AOE attacks. But Kamiya has made games with better rivals who share similar movesets. All of Nelo Angelo's fights are great. All of Vorkken's fights are great. They all have telegraphs, they all have patterns, you can learn them to perfection. I'm just guessing but my theory is that they wanted the feeling of fighting a real character who can do unpredictable things. 2 is pretty much the same at times.
 

AV

We ain't outta here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space
Playing Dark Souls 1, first Souls game and coming up against O+S.

I'm pretty sure that boss is the tutorial for "look, sometimes you should just ask for help" because I snapped, summoned the NPC and oneshot it.
 

Shifty

Member
I didn't have a point with that image, but since Kamiya was obsessed with Zelda around that time, and some ideas from Zelda went into his games, it made me think of Dark Link.

Retro also infused this into Metroid Prime, which is probably some homage to Dark Link. Fighting what is similar to yourself.

I'm not saying there is any connection to Dark Link to Kamiya or anything you said or anything, just a loose trivia connection.
That connection is an interesting thought, particularly considering the way Nelo Angelo is introduced by way of an evil mirror image of Dante before revealing his true form, which is in-line with the way Dark Link is introduced.

Dark Samus from Prime is an interesting example, since she's a silent antagonist in a similar fashion to Nelo Angelo. She definitely has plot relevance, since her genesis in 1 comes from Prime absorbing the phazon suit, and the 2/3 arc focuses on her as an antagonist with Samus gradually building back up to a comparable power set before the final confrontation. Though I'm on the fence about the character dynamic - you could interpret the silence as exchanging dialogue through actions instead of words because Samus herself is silent, but I view that more from the cosmic horror angle - i.e. being a hostile alien lifeform that you could never communicate with in the first place.

I suppose you could say similar about the SA-X from Fusion, though that's also on the monster side to my mind. The ending muddies it a bit, but I'd put those events down to self-preservation instinct rather than any kind of regard for Samus in a rival sense.
 
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ZoukGalaxy

Member
That fucking Father Gascoigne the first time, he made me rage quit the game for a whole year, FOR REAL.

Only then, the gameplay finally ticked my brain.
 
That fucking Father Gascoigne the first time, he made me rage quit the game for a whole year, FOR REAL.

Only then, the gameplay finally ticked my brain.
This Father Gascoigne has been mentioned several times now, probably one of the leading/winning answers in this thread.
 

Bakkus

Member
Gascoigne honestly isn't that hard. It's supposed to make you learn the gun parry mechanic. Once you learn that to a decent degree, the fight is among the easiest in the game.
 
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This.... THIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSS jesus christ even years later I see this image and I just fucking hate that stupid fucking music.... I mean origins has made it even worse but dear fucking god that's is not a good memory.

Now this is hard because I feel like I have fought harder things in the past but as far as something that has recently stuck with me that made me think "man this is utter bullshit who designed this?"



In the end I had to look up a guide and essentially "cheese" him... the only way to win is effectively not play the game by the rules you have used up to that point and just lock down the guy and not let him phase shift twice ever, essentially you avoid letting the battle playout and make sure to kill him in under a very small time window... its very unfun and was the lowlight of the game for me... although it was nice to get the extra trophy for beating him after so much BS.

Wtf is he from dlc or what? I have Platinum in remake but i dont recall him at all.
 

GermanZepp

Member
Was this guy for me.. mastering the moveset and the timing. Always so close to win.. when you get good and defeated it felt awesome. Like a badass choreography.



Also this b*tch

 
Was this guy for me.. mastering the moveset and the timing. Always so close to win.. when you get good and defeated it felt awesome. Like a badass choreography.



Also this b*tch


That's the thing about good boss design.

They really force you to master the mechanics of the game.
 

STARSBarry

Gold Member
Wtf is he from dlc or what? I have Platinum in remake but i dont recall him at all.

You need to finish the integrade DLC with yuffie and he will appear on hardmode at Shinra HQ in the VR machine.

Beating him rewards 2 more of the instant limit break accessories that you get one of from Pride and Joy. The downside is that the same accessory is disabled in the fight against him, so no instant limit + recharge, however it does mean you can equip one on every active party member once you beat him
 
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RAIDEN1

Member
The Metal Gears in Metal Gear Solid 2.....I lost count how many tries it took to take them down, and I only managed it when the game decided to run at a slower pace than normal, not sure why...but thanks to the drop in speed that allowed me to FINALLY beat those mechs...
 

Kupfer

Member
sMtWVlj.gif

Even made a thread about MF Radec here


But the most recent fucked up boss was the Solidus Snake rooftop battle:
maxresdefault.jpg

I just caught up on MGS2 two or three years ago on the PS Vita and I bit my teeth on this fucker. The whole game the katana has no meaning whatsoever and suddenly I'm supposed to lay a fucking boss with it? Pfff.
The Vita's tiny sticks and unstable framerate didn't make it any better.

And that only to end up here shortly afterwards .__.
mgs2_hd_metal_gear_ray_by_toadmushroom95-d716g9n.jpg
 
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T-Cake

Member
Some baddy in Heavenly Sword. I can barely remember it now but I know I had to give up the game because I couldn't get past it. The game was recently on PS Now and I was mildly curious to see if I could do it nearly 20 years later but I never did get round to it and I don't think it's available any more.
 
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