I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but Dark Souls has suitably epic boss battles which will smash your face in if you aren't prepared for them, except for the moonlight butterfly, who is piss easy if you have the summonable NPC witch to help you.
Also, I treat dragons in Skyrim like boss battles. They're epic and fun and can require some clever strategy if you're not a tanking class who can just hack the thing to death, though it gets easier later in the game.
They're all in MMO's ... the challenge? OTHER PEOPLE. And your internet... But occasionally you'll join a team that just clicks and the boss is still insanely hard. (Insanely hard to me is epic)
Not to mention the one you kill using a cannon mounted on a giant freaking train. That game was epic. Not the sequel I wanted for Lost Planet but still not a bad game at all.
On a more serious answer: Actually, the smartass answer is also kinda the serious answer. As video games tell more and more complex stories, it becomes harder to justify a knock-out boss battle at the end without stretching the realm of belief or making it too silly.
Batman: Arkham Asylum. A great game in nearly every respect, you really felt like Batman with the predator mode and the hand to hand combat, and it had a really great, tightly wound storyline. And then at the end, you have a weird boss fight with Titan infused Joker that doesn't quite "gel" with the flow of the rest of the game. And you really only have it because it's a game and we're supposed to.
Now, I love boss fights and I think every game should try to have them, if possible. But I can see how working one into a narrative can be tricky. Or working one into genres like shooters can be tricky given the mechanics at play.
Mass Effect 3, particularly the fights with Kai Leng which are probably the closest things to boss fights in the entire game. He's an agile ninja and Shepard is pretty damn clunky in comparison, but fortunately the dude came at us with a sword, we have guns and he's not fast enough to outrun bullets. The fights end up feeling rather disjointed and therefore he doesn't feel much like an epic boss fight and more like a particularly annoying regular enemy.
Still though, like I said, I love boss fights and there are still some games out there that do them well. There just aren't as many as there were back in the old days, and a lot of the ones there are now can be anti-climactic. I'm not quite sure where boss fights will end up in the future of the medium, but I hope that we can overcome these growing pains and insert them into games in a way that's satisfying in both a narrative sense and a gameplay sense.
I have to say, this kind of sounds like Nostalgia goggles. While it's true that boss battles were more of a 'thing' in older games, most of them were alright at best... and there've definitely been some good boss fights in recent games. Arkham City, Mass Effect 2, heck even Starcraft 2 has a pretty neat closer for the single-player campaign... and it's an RTS! Creativity still abounds, there's just a broader game market, so you're going to have some misses, too.
Even though it's from the previous gen, Shadow of the Colossus does boss battles better than any other game. Ever. And they even are built up ever so slightly through some disposition before you have to go after them.
i mean, you got to kill a mutha-effing REAPER... on foot... with handheld-weapons... and on 2nd-highest difficulty it took 1 round to destroy all four tubes connected to him, and then you could nearly two-hit him with the nuke-launcher
gawd, that was so ridiculous ^^
uh, never mind; of course i miss them effing hard boss battles that made you rip your nails out because they were so incredibly effing hard that they earned the name "boss fight"
hu-ar!
I know exactly how you feel, OP. Modern games, those made by western developers in particular, just don't seem to deliver when it comes to epic boss battles.
Take Skyrim for instance. When, you battle Alduin at the end of game, he's basically just another dragon. He's a lot stronger, and he has a unique (if fairly annoying) attack, but that's it. The fight doesn't even have unique music. When I took off all his health, his armor fell off, he started glowing, I was all like "hell yeah, second form, cue the music"... and then he exploded.
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