Game Killing Bosses

[TheMigrantSoldier]

Shao Kahn (final boss version) from Mortal Kombat 9's story mode. He embodies everything wrong with the coin-op era of bosses. While everyone loves to rant about how some final bosses are too easy, I think a frustrating-but-not-in-the-good-way boss can spoil the experience just as much.

 

[BrawlMan]

The end boss from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance.

Jet Stream Sam took maybe 3 tries and I hear he's supposed to be harder. 18 plus tries on the end boss and I decided I didn't need to see the end THAT bad.

Were you playing on Normal or Hard. I found Amrstong pretty easy on those difficulties He doesn't become a problem until a player bumps it up to Very Hard or Revengeance. Then talk me about pain. It took 10 tries on VH, and about 20 times on RV.

While it didn't take, the Monsoon boss fight from Metal Gear: Revengeance did make me contemplate quitting for a bit.

At that point, the game expects you to know how to parry properly, Also, EMP grenades are a life saver for a first time playthrough. I know how you feel though, as Monsoon almost killed me my first time.

BUT NOTHING! NOTHING is as a painful as 2nd phase Jasper Batt Jr! He's tolerable on Normal, but on Bitter mode, forget about it. You get no healing items, he has a possible insta-kill move if you're too close to the window, and he spams (especially when Jasper's low on health) a teleportation move that will stun lock you and knock you into the insta-death window, and he has annoying as fuck laughter. Sharing the same voice actor as Sasuke Uhchia didn't help matters either. I never beat the guy on Bitter, but I don't care. I beat the game once already, so that was enough for me. Jean and Henry were a million times better than that disgusting piece of shit.

 

[RedDeadFred]

Not so much the boss, but my own stupidity in not understanding a crucial game mechanic (though in my defense, it's never explained to you).

In Shining Force, you control a party of characters and participate in tactical turned based battles. These characters level up over time with a max level of 20. I reached a point in the game where all of my characters were level 20, so I figured it must almost be over. Then it wasn't.... and still wasn't. Gradually, my party became woefully underpowered. They'd do little dents of damage to enemies while getting 1-2 shot. I struggled through until I came across Chaos. He could OHKO anyone in my party and the damage I dealt to him was pitiful. If it was just him, I still don't think my party could have won, but he also has an army of minions, all of whom were stronger than anyone in my party. I tried many times, but ultimately decided that it was impossible.

Years later, I realized that there is a promotion system where after a character reaches level 10, you can promote them to a class that has much greater potential at the cost of a temporary stat decrease. Now it and its sequel are two of my favourite games.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Ludwig and Larry (first time, I guess) - Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam. It was at this point I got sick of the boss battle mechanic where the boss would chase you and you'd have to either throw Paper Mario at whatever's chasing you or using Paper Mario as a glider. Either way if you fuck up you suffer massive damage and it can cost you the fight.

Nyx Avatar - Persona 3. I attempted this fight precisely 3 times, and the first 2 times I got within a hair's breath of beating him only to lose it. The third time I didn't have the energy for that incredibly loooooooooong fight anymore.

 

[Remus]

Shao Kahn (final boss version) from Mortal Kombat 9's story mode. He embodies everything wrong with the coin-op era of bosses. While everyone loves to rant about how some final bosses are too easy, I think a frustrating-but-not-in-the-good-way boss can spoil the experience just as much.

I actually had to look online to find a workable strat against him, a strat that basically amounted to teleport, hit, teleport, hit, if he throws the hammer, teleport and kick. A ton of repetition using two, maybe three moves and any break from the routine was instant death. Yea I nearly broke a controller on this one.

I stopped playing Bloodborne after about the third boss. The first wasn't terrible, the second I used a bell on and me and my partner cleaned his clock. The third? fuggetaboutit. I don't need the frustration.

 

[Dalisclock]

Majority of boss fights in Dragon's Dogma...ridiculous amount of mindless clicking in a typical target-that-glowing spot japanese action game design.
Plenty of bosses in Dark Souls were not difficult, but cheap( Kapri demon, in particular)...but at least they went down fairly quickly.

The beauty of Souls is that in the off chance a boss is cheap, there's usually a way to be cheap right back. For ol' Capri, I ran up the stairs in the back and stood on the back ledge lobbing firebombs and arrows until he had a sliver of health left, then jumped down and gave him his coupe de grace with a sword.

Or just stand outside his fog wall and lob them over the wall, I chose dung pies. I also cheesed stray demon and ceaseless discharge.

I found ceaseless Discharge surprisingly easy and beat him on the first try. I asked a friend if he's supposed to be a joke. Apparently he's a lot harder if you're not playing a strength build.

But Capra demon to this day is my most hated boss in that game(even Biggie Smalls didn't earn my contempt the way that guy did). I eventually resorted to tossing firebombs over the wall because every attempt to enter that room ended with him either chopping me just after I entered the room, or his damn dogs knocking me down and then the capra demon killing me from there. And I could never kill his damn dogs fast enough to focus on him before he killed me.

Suffice to say, I took great pleasure in meeting the capra demons in the demon ruins which were much easier to take down.

 

[Raddra]

Valkyria Chronicles, the first battle vs the Batomys. You're having a good battle, then some invincible anime check rushes in and starts 100% accuracy killing your soldiers left and right. After the third try in this long anoying plodding mission I just gave up and never played it again.

 

[omega 616]

Majority of boss fights in Dragon's Dogma...ridiculous amount of mindless clicking in a typical target-that-glowing spot japanese action game design.
Plenty of bosses in Dark Souls were not difficult, but cheap( Kapri demon, in particular)...but at least they went down fairly quickly.

The beauty of Souls is that in the off chance a boss is cheap, there's usually a way to be cheap right back. For ol' Capri, I ran up the stairs in the back and stood on the back ledge lobbing firebombs and arrows until he had a sliver of health left, then jumped down and gave him his coupe de grace with a sword.

Or just stand outside his fog wall and lob them over the wall, I chose dung pies. I also cheesed stray demon and ceaseless discharge.

I found ceaseless Discharge surprisingly easy and beat him on the first try. I asked a friend if he's supposed to be a joke. Apparently he's a lot harder if you're not playing a strength build.

He hit me like a truck, so I ran around that big boulder and found a spot where I could fire arrows at his tentacles and he couldn't hit me. Took a long ass time though. Not as long as the stray demon though.

 

[Glongpre]

This doesn't really count, but trying to kill Ares on God mode in God of War. The second phase of the fight is bullshit, and I could not for the life of me find anyway to beat him. So I just said fuck it, I beat the game, fuck this boss.

 

[gsilver]

A lot of fighting games have bosses that are just BS, and go against established mechanics of the game.
When I get to one of those, I usually just quit.

 

[Dalisclock]

Valkyria Chronicles, the first battle vs the Batomys. You're having a good battle, then some invincible anime check rushes in and starts 100% accuracy killing your soldiers left and right. After the third try in this long anoying plodding mission I just gave up and never played it again.

Not quite that battle, but the one where you have to cross a no mans land and then she shows up to wreck your fun and kill all of your guys is a pain in the ass, especially since you can't stop her and a tank shell just slows her down. Oh, and a tank is sitting on top of the final control zone to end the mission, so it becomes a race against time to kill it before she kills you. Hope you brought enough rocket up there....

VC is one of those games where I liked it until the magical super girl(s) became the center of attention. We had a perfectly good WW2 analogy going there(even if the concentration camp bit was very....sanitized) and then suddenly "SUPER POWERS! ROBOT HITLER!" and the whole thing seems to lose something around that point.

 

[Skops]

Bosses rarely do that for me. Generally, it's how much stupid stuff I have to do to get back to the boss that kills the game for me.

Weirdly enough, the tutorial boss fight of Warrior Within ended it for me (Ms Iron Thong). Mind you, what happened was I died once and realised I had no desire to continue, so I think she was more the straw that broke the camel's back.

Warrior Within had one of the worst openings I've ever seen in a game. It demands that you make a massive, instant tonal shift from The Sands of Time to its new, darker, edgier aesthetic. It then decides to spend the first 5-10 minutes of the game on combat, rather than the platforming that people actually play Prince of Persia primarily for. It's almost as-if it was specifically designed to keep as many people away from the game as possible. And it's a shame because it had some of the best platforming and combat in the series. It just did an awful job introducing it.

Agreed 100%. Warrior Within is actually my favorite in the series, but man, that first 15 minutes is the absolute worst. It should have just been a cutscene.

On Topic:

Cobar's Walker in Killzone: Liberation

Spoiler

I think the game is pretty good otherwise, but this boss fight is too long (4 phases I believe, with no health packs). In the last phase after all your cover is destroyed, the homing missiles are too numerous and the splash damage is too strong for you to have time to stop and shoot. Really annoying.

 

[Rip Van Rabbit]

Honestly, I love boss fights. So I'm struggling to think of an adequate example that kills my interest.

Instead, I do have a boss fight that I actively avoid: "The Line" from the game "Furi".

Spoiler: This little fucker right here

Third boss in the game.
Phase 1) His gimmick is an array of reflective shields that turn your projectiles against you. Solution: Use charged shots. It's tedious but careful.
Phase 2) He turns the arena into a minefield of damaging orbs. Solution: Wait for him to come to you.
Phase 3) He teleports and attacks from all angles. His windup is long enough, but the release animation on his attacks is ridiculously fast.

Now this is all doable. He is just the only boss that I don't have an "A-rank" or "S-rank" on. Why? Because the arena is brightly lit and becomes further oversaturated when he distorts time. What does this mean? Your targeting reticule is obscured, it's hard to see everything clearly and I got more mileage from listening to audio cues and mentally timing his rapid-fire attacks.

This boss is reason why I'd rather go to the stage select and replay anything else. O__o

 

[Raddra]

VC is one of those games where I liked it until the magical super girl(s) became the center of attention.

Agreed so much. The game was excellent until they ruined it with the stupid magic super waifu's.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Another one that broke me is that Dark Elf from Final Fantasy IV. He was already hammering me into the ground to the point where only Tellah was left standing and only had enough MP left for 1 casting of his most powerful spell so I said to myself "If this doesn't finish him, I'm screwed." Not only did it not finish him, he pulled the Dragon Ball Z "this isn't even my final form" thing and transformed into a serpent-y dragon type thing. At that point I just gave up.

 

[MeatMachine]

I think I might have gotten stuck on Final Fantasy Tactics in the GBA, I want to say a Judge?

RULE: You cannot use Swords in this fight.
Half of your team are Sword-users.
Your Sword-user gets attacked by an enemy Sword-user.
Your Sword-user counter-attacks automatically and kills the enemy.
Red-carded by Judge, sent to prison for 3 more battles.

 

[laggyteabag]

Basically any boss in Warzone Firefight in Halo 5. They're massive bullet sponges, they are pinpoint accurate, they can kill you without giving you a chance to react, and they don't obey by the regular rules of the game. Banshee Raiders and the Grunt Mech in particular.

 

[Worgen]

Triple Trouble in Guild Wars 2. It's completely optional, but it's also obscenely difficult for all the wrong reasons. Long story short is that it more or less requires the overwhelming majority of the map population to beat it[footnote]3 simultaneous bosses at three different locations, each of which is generally accepted to need 40-50 people to beat, and the estimate for the hard cap on the map population is 150[/footnote], and they need to be expertly coordinated with dedicated teams for specific roles, and the bosses have to be killed within a minute of each other. It has actually been described to me as an event where a single player (out of 120-150) can ruin the attempt.

Spoiler: This one...

Made me had a really bad time, doomed me to death of KARMA, got me dunked on... I'll stop now.

Never attempted it again after the 27th try.

In fairness...that is literally the character's intention.

Spoiler: Major Undertale Spoilers

Sans comes in to fight specifically because he realizes that you're about to pass the point of no return. The character knows that you can reset, and his goal at that point is to either stop you in your tracks or make you reset; to make you give up one way or the other. Reason being that...

Spoiler: Major Undertale Spoiler Round 2

Completing the Genocide Route permanently 'taints' your game by more or less having the main character possessed by a now-evil ghost. Starting over does not remove that possession, and indeed gives even the True Pacifist ending(s) decidedly genocidal overtones.

The only way to avoid this outcome is to not finish your fight with Sans and give up on the Genocide Route. The character knows that because of the reset mechanic it's not a question of if you can beat him, it's when, so his goal is to get the player to give up.

If you want to take down any world boss in GW2 then you need to join one of the TTS guilds, they regularly do them and they are very organized, but they do require participation at least once a month.

 

[Worgen]

Another one that broke me is that Dark Elf from Final Fantasy IV. He was already hammering me into the ground to the point where only Tellah was left standing and only had enough MP left for 1 casting of his most powerful spell so I said to myself "If this doesn't finish him, I'm screwed." Not only did it not finish him, he pulled the Dragon Ball Z "this isn't even my final form" thing and transformed into a serpent-y dragon type thing. At that point I just gave up.

I think that might be one of the few bosses that is vulnerable to death, or virus or weak. Some spell that doesn't work on any other bosses but it just murders him hard.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Not so much the boss, but my own stupidity in not understanding a crucial game mechanic (though in my defense, it's never explained to you).

In Shining Force, you control a party of characters and participate in tactical turned based battles. These characters level up over time with a max level of 20. I reached a point in the game where all of my characters were level 20, so I figured it must almost be over. Then it wasn't.... and still wasn't. Gradually, my party became woefully underpowered. They'd do little dents of damage to enemies while getting 1-2 shot. I struggled through until I came across Chaos. He could OHKO anyone in my party and the damage I dealt to him was pitiful. If it was just him, I still don't think my party could have won, but he also has an army of minions, all of whom were stronger than anyone in my party. I tried many times, but ultimately decided that it was impossible.

Years later, I realized that there is a promotion system where after a character reaches level 10, you can promote them to a class that has much greater potential at the cost of a temporary stat decrease. Now it and its sequel are two of my favourite games.

Oh my God, this made me laugh!! It might cathartic for you to watch the Long Play of DaTruthDT playing Shining Force II; he waits to promote until level 40, so he's WAAAAY overpowered for basically the entire second half of the game, like 2-shotting bosses with +100 health OP'd; it's ridiculous.