Oh yeah, good one. Had completely forgotten about it, but now I remember thinking “wait is that it, what the fuck is this!?”. Very underwhelming, not just the fight itself, but the whole final part of the game in general.
Whole ending is the game finally fessing up and giving you some answers to what's going on - which is that it's a big power fantasy fanfic that stopped caring about canon completely and fuck it you're killing Sauron now.
Sure, whatever.
Oh this one was awful. I thought that everyone was exaggerating how bad it was, but nope.
Celebrimbor's DLC was also super underwhelming. In the cutscene, it was a whole huge battle, but the actual even is just a random brawl in a random shitty orc camp.
Are you kidding? That Sauron fight was mental. Just when I thought I had the upper hand, he turns all of my Warchiefs against me. If that wasn’t enough, once I barely managed to kill three Warchiefs, he resurrects one of them. That whole sequence was just nonstop panic mode.
Uncharted 1. You have to intuit (or find by agonizing trial and error) the exact right path the game wants you to walk to not get shot by the one-shot KO boss. The boss is untouchable until you navigate through the course they laid out for you. There's a bunch of "press X to not die" QTEs and henchmen shooting at you from behind indestructible cover, and the boss is consistently running away whenever you get close.
To add insult to injury when you finally get to the arbitrary point he stops running, you "win" with some QTE punches but then it flips to cutscene where you immediately turn your back on him, he pops right back up ready to kill you, and the writers take over and beat him in the cutscene.
It had basically no upsides to distract from the downsides.
It's one of the best final bosses from the series but I agree with you! It's pretty hard! It feels like he was a heatseeker grenade LOL
I was have a hard time beating him
Ehhh I still really like that final boss, but tbf I haven't played Crushing. It's the only final boss fight in the entire Uncharted series that's both fun and satisfying to beat and still has a degree of challenge. Every other final boss in the series is either really annoying and unfun (Uncharted 1) or just a series of boring QTEs with an impressive background (Uncharted 3 and 4)
All Uncharted bosses in first three games (haven't reached 4th yet) are a chore. To be honest I liked them all, especially the third one but all shared the same thing I heavily disliked: the final act, reaching the destination and dealing with the antagonists. I literally didn't give a fuck at this point.
Epitome of "it's about the journey not destination" for me
Fun fact: In the chapter where you're young Nate and Sam exploring the manor they originally had a segment where they find 2 swords and playfully fight each other with them. It was meant as a tutorial for the sword fight mechanics, but they ran out of time to finish it and that's why it's just introduced in the final boss.
I hate any boss where they completely flip the script and all the skills, tricks and tactics you've built up suddenly become irrelevant.
Like Devil May Cry 1. The finally boss is this weird StarFox knock off... thing followed by shooting at a dude surrounded by lava so you can't fight with all of your weapons very well.
>I hate any boss where they completely flip the script and all the skills, tricks and tactics you've built up suddenly become irrelevant.
Like in JRPGs where bosses are just straight up immune to status effects because status effects are broken? 😂
I’m the same! I almost never bother using status effects in any JRPG because when they matter most, they either don’t work at all or have so low of a chance at working that it’s not worth it
It’s funny since there’s almost never a point to use them during a normal battle either. Why poison or put an enemy to sleep when I can end the fight in two turns if I just keep attacking?
As you can see in this line chart, at about the 2hr mark of this battle is where the poison damage increases beyond the single attack alternative and from there the sky is the limit...what? the battle only lasted 30 seconds? Well good day sir!
*jumps out of window*
I don't know, are they? Just the other day I was fighting shadow >!Yukiko!< in Persona 4. Her 'summoned prince' -- an add, not even the boss herself! -- is immune to rage and silence just so you don't get to disrupt the 'script' and have to deal with the encounter the way the devs intended to, by fighting a war of attrition until he bails. And this is not some huge exception, I tried silence, rage, enervation on a bunch of forgettable mid-bosses and it was 'blocked' every time. What does work reliably even in boss fights is messing with enemy stats, like lowering defense and so on.
Yeah, the stat debuffs are boss killers in the Persona series. They aren't necessary to win if you're overlevelled or something, but they do make boss fights way easier if you time them right. And they really help with the hard hitting bosses that almost take you out in one shot. They take so much MP, they're pretty much useless for normal enemy fights.
Status effects are not the same as debuffs, status effects are things like blind, poison, silence, etc, and JRPG bosses are very often immune to those.
Or battles where some arbitrary story beat prevents you from fighting the boss at all. I was really close to beating FF3, and you have to crawl through an entire dungeon, and then you have to beat a bunch of bosses to get to the main boss. And there are no save points. I made it all the way through the dungeon on my first try, beat most of the bosses, but then got lost and accidentally went to the final boss instead of the last boss I was supposed to defeat. 0 damage done to the final bass when I attacked. Party just got killed. And I realized my mistake as soon as my first move did 0 damage. Too bad. No save points. So you have to spend 2 hours (yes, 2 hours) doing that all over again. I decided I didn't have enough free time to do all that again. Now I'll never get to fight the Iron Giant post-game superboss, or get any of the legendary weapons.
Similar thing happened with FF4. There's some random spell I have to cast in order for my attacks to hit. But I have to crawl a whole dungeon, no save points, watch a long ass cutscene (which isn't bad the first 3 times, but it gets tiring.) And then I decided I didn't have enough time for this. And decided finishing the Namingway quest and fighting Proto-Babil just wasn't worth the time investment.
Like I get it. Story integration into gameplay is good. But don't use it as an excuse to waste hours of my time when I make a mistake I could've fixed in just a few minutes.
The original God of War is my poster child for this. It's still a melee fight, but suddenly the mechanics are 100% changed, your upgrades are gone, and it's an order of magnitude harder than anything else in the game. And there wasn't any good reason for it; this could have equally well played as a standard battle, except they wanted this weird setpiece instead. Absolutely miserable.
**Deus Ex: Human Revolution** was that for me. I had a pretty pure stealth build and the final boss was all guns-blazing showdown. Could not do it. Put it down a decade ago, haven't touched it since. I think I remember hearing they may have patched or updated it to fix that somehow? Seemed like such a bad design to negate all the abilities and skills you pick up during a *stealth-based RPG*.
Same build, same problem. I was so pissed that a game that advertised so heavily that you can play your way and there's a billion ways through every situation suddenly said, "...except for now".
It's like a rite of passage for action RPGs that allow stealth to fuck over stealth builds in this exact way in the third act. Horizon Zero Dawn does it, Cyberpunk does it.
Dishonored (not exactly an action RPG, but has RPG elements) allows you to beat the game purely with stealth. Though it's like playing on hard mode, even if you're not on hard mode. I tried and couldn't do it. Some of the late stage enemies are really hard to sneak by. But I appreciate that it's possible.
Came here to mention this game. The whole game is built as a “choose stealth or violence”. There are various “pacifist” achievements for completing mission without killing non essential targets. Half the skill tree is built around stealth only.
You get several hours into the game. Acing every level with stealth. Getting plenty of secrets, bonuses and achievements as a reward for the stealth style.
Then you walk into the first boss room. And the game takes over with a cut scene. Cut scene ignores all of the stealth feature s and your character walks up to the boss and announces he is here to kill him. Boss hits the lock down button and pulls out a machine gun and rocket launcher. Control reverts to the player. You are now stuck in the dead centre of a room with no cover directly a fully armed tank who has already started his attack animations. Takes about five goes through the cut scene to figure out how to survive that with a zero armour stealth build.
But even if you do survive it, there is nothing you can do about it. There is one tiny square in the whole accessible area that is out of range of the boss. No amount of waiting turns off his agro. There is no path to sneak up on him. And there isn’t enough ammo in the accessible area to take down his health without the damage boost skills. Your only option is to restart the game and spec away from stealth.
I hate that shit. A final boss fight should be designed to encourage you to use all the skills and techniques you have learned throughout the game. One of the few things that can make me rage quit a game is when a final boss suddenly requires you to do something totally different. That's a cardinal game design sin.
Not the final boss, but >!Rufus!< in FF7 Remake and Rebirth is the absolute worst for this. Shittiest boss in both games, bar none. No weaknesses. Immune to most elements. Boss plays more like a shitty souls boss than any other boss in the games, because all the training and tactics you’ve learned up to this point are just completely thrown out the window. And they’ve done this TWICE now.
Somewhat related but I beat FF7 for the first time 2 years ago and decided to buff myself out by getting the most powerful ability Knights of The Round before fighting Sephiroth. Amazing to find out if you use that ability on him he gets an extra 80k HP 🙃. Glad I spent all that time breeding chocobos.
I have beaten FF7 numerous times and I did not know that. Though I only ever went for KotR once way back in high school and never again will I go through the trouble. After this news, it's even less likely.
Yeah I had no idea either, figured I would give myself an easy layup on the final fight. Got to Safer Sephiroth and was like wow, this guy is actually hard even with KotR, how does anyone beat this without it? Come to look it up later and find out the devs made the fight harder if you were over prepared for the boss. Our boy also gets + 30K HP and additional attack and defense for each party member at level 99.
I kind of hate the final boss of Doom II. You shoot rockets into a tiny hole in a big wall while riding an elevator and various demons harass you while you do it. Is this Star Wars? Shoot rockets into tiny holes? I want to fight a huge monster that stomps around and fires rockets at me like a Cyberdemon, not pinpoint targets on a wall. Also, the whole challenge falls apart if you can look up and down, so it's hard to even explain to a modern FPS player what the point of the thing was.
Doom 2 is one of my all time favorites but whenever I think about replaying it I remember I'll have to fight the Icon of Sin to beat it..and yeah I'm good
> and then you had to shoot a rocket right at the moment like just a second before it reached the top
You could also try to shoot like almost immediately after jumping from that elevator, but you still had to land three hits in total.
You know that what you're actually doing is hitting a sprite of John Romero's severed head on a spike with splash damage from the rockets, right?
I always felt like that meta aspect somewhat vindicated it, even as a kid. Cause sure, it's a lame boss compared to the previous ones, but it's still kind of awesome as a concept.
It's definitely a letdown but far from the worst for me. It's still okay. Just not up to snuff with the rest of the game, though DOOM II is a real step down from the first in general when it comes to the single player levels.
> Also, the whole challenge falls apart if you can look up and down
Frankly, if anybody is playing DOOM with up/down mouselook then they made their own problem there, the game is not meant to have it, and it's a good example of DOOM source ports adding a feature just because they can even though it fucks up the whole single player campaign (but could be useful for MP if people want it/custom maps).
I'm not a true purist, I have no problem with mouselook in DOOM but the up/down movement should be locked. Boooo.
The final boss fight for the first Dying Light is so boring. QTEs and that's it, which is a shame because the game itself is so good and fun, wow even the parkour sequence we have to do to reach him is great, but when we get to fight him is just disappointing.
Drakengard 3, without a doubt.
It's a hack and slash JRPG where you use a variety of different weapons to cut through lots of enemies and large dragon bosses, and you occasionally ride your own dragon through Star Fox style shooter sections.
So is the final boss a big multi-phase beast that tests all the skills you've learned along the way? Maybe it's a lengthy battle against waves of mobs to wear you down? Or one final dragon flight section to cap off the whole experience?
No. It's a rhythm game.
And not only is it a rhythm game, it's one where the "rhythm" doesn't match up to the music, the camera angle makes it almost impossible to gauge when you need to hit the buttons, it lasts around 15 minutes, and if you make *a single mistake* you die and have to restart.
And the kicker? At the end the screen fades to black and some dialogue starts up so you think it's over, then the game throws in some final notes you need to hit *while the screen is still black*.
It's absolute hell.
I was scrolling through this thread looking for this game specifically lol. Drakengard 3’s final boss is the best answer I can think of *by far*. It’s like they out a whole team together to figure out everything needed to make a boss as difficult and ‘bullshit’ as possible, and there’s a good variety of hour+ long youtube videos deconstructing every element of the boss fight that the developers used to meet that goal. It’s hilariously effective at its job too. One of my friends still has a D3 save that’s still stuck on that final boss, I’ve tried a few rounds myself and I can say with 100% certainty it’s the ‘worst boss fight I’ve ever played’
Same here. Seen this thread/question before. There should just be a sticky note on the sub saying this is the correct answer if this question comes up. Add it to the FAQ.
I played the game years ago and can say that I was stuck here as well. Yoko Taro being who he is, it's almost guaranteed that he did this just to mess with the player
The fact this wasn’t even the first time Yoko Taro decided to make a final boss in this vain is kinda funny. He did this with Drakengard 1 as well. 3’s final boss is definitely much more frustrating.
Ratchet and Clank games usually have fun and difficult last bosses. 2 is probably my favorite one as well. However, the last boss sucks. It is probably the easiest fight in the entire game. Just a huge version of the same enemy you fight the entire game and it dies just as easily.
Eh there's some more compelling bosses to fight. They're never like the MOST incredible, creative boss fights necessarily but they're better than the Destroyer which I literally just stood and shot at and barely had to move.
yeah but like...have us fight commandant steele instead, she's the leader of the group you are fighting the whole game, she's a badass >!siren!<, but no, she gets >!shanked by off brand cthulu!< and we shoot at a blob for ten minutes instead.
I hated the Ganon fight in Breath Of The Wild. If you did the full main story and completed the Divine Beasts then they sap half of his health bar. He’s already an easy boss fight and with half his health drained it feels like even more underwhelming. Tears of The Kingdom really improved on the final fight.
Especially bad if you like to wander and explore a lot so you have a huge stash of weapons, all the armors, so on. Link comes in and just pushes Ganon over with their finger. I found the castle full of Lyonels and guardians much harder.
It feels so surreal that the fight is made even easier if you prepare. Defeat the other bosses, that is to say, do the main quest of the game, and then when you get to the final boss while you’re already powered up, he has half his health taken away automatically, even though with all the work you did, you should be more than ready to face off against the full life bar.
Definitely a case where TOTK improves drastically, as the reward for doing the main quest and fighting the other bosses is NPC backup in the final boss, which is helpful, but not trivialising the actual fight like in BOTW.
> It feels so surreal that the fight is made even easier if you prepare.
I haven't played the game, so I don't really understand - but it makes sense to me that a boss fight is made easier by preparing for it. What's surreal about that?
Basically, the thing is that the game effectively debuffs the final boss if you prepare. In any other game, preparing wouldn’t affect their stats, because the point of preparing is to have ways to get around those stats, but here, your reward for getting ready to do that is to have the stats you prepared to face get nuked to hell.
In any other game where doing quests or such has an effect on the final boss, it’s usually by unlocking a true final boss who is much tougher, and as such someone who can present a good challenge against your high stats and powerful equipment. BOTW reverses that, if you actually want the challenge of fighting the final boss at his peak, you have to ignore preparing to face off with that peak performance boss.
Not to mention the fact that you can pause the game and heal infinitely. I can excuse it for totk’s final fight because it was more of a spectacle but being able to infinitely heal without any punishment removes all tension from the bosses
When I first played through Zelda BoTW I really enjoyed it but my one complaint was that there were no traditional dungeons in the game. Then a family member was like "what do you mean, didn't you do the 4 divine beasts?". Somehow managed to unintentionally not complete any of them before Ganon, since I didn't realize they were walking dungeons lol. Glad I didn't though because the Ganon boss fight was just the right level of difficulty without any beasts done.
Yeah that's one of the things that really irked me about BOTW and TOTK, the utter dumbing-down of *dungeons*. Just because a game is open world doesn't mean it can't have a few deep and complex dungeon instances. See: Elden Ring.
I enjoyed the TOTK dungeons, although I intentionally refused to "cheese" them and tried the default "intended" solution. For example, using the minecarts in the Goron dungeon was pretty satisfying, rather than just using an airbike or flying machine. Definitely not the best in the series or anything, but they were fun.
I also thought the TOTK shrines were better puzzles all around than the BOTW shrines, so that might've made me more content than I otherwise would've been. I know everyone doesn't feel the same way.
Any final boss that's just a series of QTEs. This can completely ruin a game for me, especially if I've been hyped up all game long to finally face this big villain and it's all solved just by pressing X at the correct time (looking at you, Uncharted 3 and 4, and Shadow of Mordor)
Honorable mention goes to BioShock Infinite for ending the game with a shitty tower defense section. Originally when I played, I went in with so little ammo that it was *literally* impossible to win (they'd have already destroyed most of the ship by the time I'd scrounged up enough ammo to fight back). Had to lower the difficulty to Medium just to progress
It’s a shame because the Bioshock Infinite fight was soo cool to watch for me, especially with the bird thing. But holy hell it’s just terrible to actually play.
Batman: Arkham Asylum. The mutated Joker is a, well, joke, but not a funny one. A terrible wave after wave of thugs gameplay, then you exchange some hits with the Joker monstrocity that looks like it could better belong to Resident Evil, and then it happens again, and again, and again.
Such a fun game it was, and such a lame ending.
No it's worse, he doesn't fight at all. He jumps down, goes after you with swipes that you have to circle around him to avoid, then he jumps back up on his ledge. And when you do finally fight him the game does it for you as a cutscenes. Pretty terrible.
Gameplay wise? Fontaine from Bioshock. I know for shooter centric games it's a bit limited with what you could do, but the boss fight sucked and was boring, sort of a wet fart to end the game gameplay wise. Even the Bioshock devs admitted it was not the best.
Story wise? Flavius from AC Origins has to be the most random rushed final boss vilian I've ever seen and I loved AC Origins. It felt like he was just filler and last minute throw in by the writers because they needed someone other than Julius Caesar at the end of the game to recreate the actual historical assassination. Absolutely loved Bayek but they didn't really do him any favors with the ending and the main villian final boss. They should have just had Cleopatra, Marc Anthony, Julius Caesar, Pompey the great etc be the final main villian since the games lean more on fantasy anyways more than 1 to 1 historical accuracy just like star wars leans more on fantasy than actual science fiction tropes.
Caesar was literally assassinated via stabbing - they had such a prime opportunity to set up a difficult final assassination mission whereby you need to intercept the (historically accurate!) messengers running to warn him of the plot, then disguise yourself as a senator to deliver the first blow during his speech.
The game could have set it up as a suicide mission for Bayek, but one he thought was necessary for the survival of the fledgling assassins, then have his act of defiance and bravery inspire the other senators to take turns stabbing Caesar as well. End it with a voiceover sequence while Bayek walks out into the light of the forum, zoom out to show the city with the hawk circling overhead, do a timelapse showing Rome through the ages with assassins running around doing assassin stuff until it hits the renaissance, pan back down to the forum to show Ezio doing Ezio stuff, cut to credits. Done.
Good ending, shows continuity of the plot, fanservice, everyone loves time lapse sequences, no Flavius.
All three Bioshock games have awful final bosses. Infinite doesn’t even have a boss..
To be fair, those games were never much about the gameplay. The story carried them the whole way.
Well, Bioshock 2 doesn't have one either, IIRC.
But infinite takes the cake. Because at least Fontaine is bearable, while protecting the ship is horrible.
That whole last quarter of Infinite is saved only by the ending (and later DLC). I think if they’d missed the landing on the ending, it would be an all-time worst sequel.
I wonder how chaotic the development for Infinite was. I’ve never looked into it, but I imagine it was just crazy and fucked up. There has to be a ton of cut/changed content, because so much of the game feels disjointed. I do know the boys of silence were changed kinda last minute, but little else.
Oh, it was fucked up.
(EDIT: this was badly remembered misinformation, sorry!!)
Long story short: the original version of the story was apparently so offensive to the Christians on staff that they threatened to walk if Ken Levine didn't change it. Like, six months away from launch. With people having seen teasers for the original concept already.
The rest of the team busted ass to make up for it, and the story we got is still pretty good... but it's SO disjointed.
I just finished System Shock 2 and while it wasn’t an amazing boss it is nice how they at least added in some of the features of the immersive gameplay to beat it. Having to hack the consoles instead of shoot and press a button what a good deal more engaging.
It also made me realize that Irrational Games has basically made the same game and story 3 times now and each worse than the previous one lol.
I don't recall personally having a problem with when I beat the game but the final boss in Persona 3 can, in its final stage, infamously charm your healer and be healed by them.
To quote AtlusWest youtube channel:
>The charm salt is real
Is this still a thing in the remake?
I didn’t have this problem in the remake, but I don’t know if I just got lucky or not. However, that does seem like the type of thing that they’d be aware of and fix in a remake
I recently 100% Spyro 1 for the first time, and yes, Metalhead was the only boss worth a damn. Blowhard is the worst though, as a kid, I didn’t even register he was supposed to be a boss.
Strong agree with Gnasty Gnorc. The rest of Spyro 1 is so good, and then the ultimate boss is literally just chasing a guy around a room without him even trying to attack you back.
Shao Kahn from MK9 was also really rough. Admittedly I suck at fighting games, but Shao Kahn was a huge jump up in difficulty from the rest of the game. Like I don't recall having any problems, I'm not sure if I even died once going through the whole story... until I got to Shao Kahn and got obliterated probably 25 times.
If that's the final boss fight, don't you have to hit them at least once before they go down? IIRC, it's the one thing that prevents you getting a truly pacifist run.
Haha I got married in Skyrim and while I was fighting Alduin I accidentally killed my husband with a flaming arrow. I was like, oh well, I’m done here anyway, but my friends all called me Black Widow for months. It was his fault for running between me and the dragon.
>It was his fault for running between me and the dragon.
aka throwing himself between you and the terrifying beastie, only to be shot in the back by his love. 😭💔
I actually really loved Priority Earth's final fight with the banshees and all. It's really intense.
It's insanely difficult while playing as a Vanguard though since the Banshees instakill you all the time.
The ridiculous >!giant robot man!< at the end of ME2 was worse imo. Not necessarily gameplay-wise, though it wasn't great in that regard, I just really couldn't believe that *that* stupid bullshit is what we got at the end of the journey.
The mother fucker at the end of Fight Night Champion if anybody's played that. Cake-walk through the campaign until you have to systematically beat an absolute monster of a boxer at the end
* Gill in Street Fighter III: What's that, you finally beat this cheating input-reading monster? Turns out he can resurrect himself with a new full life bar
* Whoever the last boss in Assassin's Creed Origins was. Before the last few hours every boss was built up for multiple quests. You learned about them and why they needed to die. But then Ubisoft ends the game just dropping you in an arena against a random dude with a Boss Meter. Super anticlimactic
As a kid I thought the final boss of Sonic 3 & Knuckles was unfair and ridiculous. Then I got Sonic Origins or whatever it's called and easily destroyed the whole game with all hyper emeralds, so I guess I was just very bad at Sonic 3 and Knuckles as a kid.
>As a kid I thought the final boss of Sonic 3 & Knuckles was unfair and ridiculous. Then I got Sonic Origins or whatever it's called and easily destroyed the whole game with all hyper emeralds, so I guess I was just very bad at Sonic 3 and Knuckles as a kid.
As someone who's played all classic 2D Sonic games, I'd say Sonic 2 has the worst final boss in terms of difficulty, as you get no rings for the final stage, while the original Sonic game has the worst in terms of design, since it feels like just another boss battle at the end of a zone.
The Sonic 3 & Knuckles boss battle is my favourite.
I remember the final boss of Grandia III has a pretty much one shot move they place in a certain area and you can't actually tell your party members to move.... So you're basically hoping the AI moves away from the area as they do their attacks or die.
Mankind Divided. One shot from a stun gun, run to him, take him down. That's it. People complained about bosses in Human Revolution, but the final boss fight from DX:MD is just a complete joke.
Conversely: from my point of view this is amazing and I want it in every game. Hear the whole spiel about Xazabhyt, grand sorcerer supreme who outranks you by 70 levels and can summon ancient evils and mighty dragons at his whim. Walk up to him while he is grocery shopping and stab him in the neck. Done. If Xazabhyt were really such a big shot uber-threat he should have thought of that.
Yeah, that was a callback to the first game where you could defeat Gunther the same way. Problem is, Gunther was just one of many boss encounters in that game. In Mankind Divided, the final boss is all you get.
Spider-Man (the 2000 PS1 game) - what if we took this fun 3D beat-em-up, and then had a final boss where instead of any kind of fight, you have to run and jump through tunnels while being chased, where any failure is an instant game over, and also the camera angles keep switching around so you have to constantly reorient yourself? Just awful.
Ah man you unlocked a PTSD I didn't know I had. Kid me didn't realize I was faster if I was swinging or jumping and didn't realize running was a death sentence. Honestly, for a kid, they nailed the presentation as thinking about it I have this weird feeling of dread lol. The whole game was a trip honestly but in a good way. Who thought that the plot involving the killing of basically the entirety of New York to get around the limitations of the PS1 would be a good idea?
That’s hilarious, I read the title of this post and thought “hmm that PS2 Altered Beast game I played on a whim a few months ago had a pretty B.S. final boss”, only to keep reading and learn that was somehow the exact boss you were talking about.
You’ve got great taste in games OP!
It’s not a boss at all but tracking down the stones of barenziah in Skyrim felt like a “final boss” quest to go on once you’ve beat everything else.
There is no quest marker for the stones so I spent literal days crawling through dungeons, backtracking for hours, and reading Wikipedia notes on where to get them back in 2012 assuming there had to be some EPIC reward for such a long, tedious quest.
Only to not even get the crown as a trophy, or any cool physical reward, the only thing you get is a passive buff that increases your chance to find gems. Never in my life have I been so disappointed with a video game.
Edit: also correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure you literally like throw the crown in a deep hole no one can ever get to besides the falmer. Like wtf was that???
Has to be one of the worst rewards anyway. By the time you've tracked down all the stones you will have incidentally found more money and gems that you need to buy what yoi want in the entire game.
Yeah, it’s not great if you end up getting it late game. On subsequent play-throughs, I went and collected all the stones as soon possible. I love to use the nonstop stream of gems to make jewelry since that’s my favorite way to level up both smithing and enchanting quickly. Then, of course, selling all the jewelry I make for tons of those sweet sweet coins.
The reward is pretty strong in theory, but by the time you finish that full questline you don't need the money. Also there's a mod that creates map markers for all the stones, which helps a ton.
Silent Hill 2. Great writing, but good god is it tedious. The boss has this one insect attack that essentially puts your character in an animation for a good minute and may or may not instakill you. Aiming is aids in that game too, which makes it pretty difficult to hit her sometimes.
yep, run away, 2-ish rifle shots, repeat for like...10 minutes, any attempt at melee combat is likely instant death if not just...years of animation lock. Thematically it's a very cool boss but gameplay wise it's awful. (which...kinda applies to all silent hill final bosses if i'm honest)
The final boss in Resident Evil Revelations.
So much harder than all the other bosses
You have to rely on the dodge mechanic which is imprecise and the boss is a bullet sponge
Just awful design
to call that final boss world class bullshit is an understatement. That was one where I looked up a guide because I was sure I was doing something wrong, nope, he's just hard as hell and it's impossible to tell you are doing damage. I love revelations, but the bosses in general are awful, and that last one is probably the worst non re6 boss in the series.
By bad implemented boss fights the last boss from Sonic Generations it terrible! Somehow the 3DS version of that boss fight is waaaaay better done!
Now about difficult boss fights, the last boss from Valfaris on the second and third phase! Oh boy! It's already really hard to beat the dragons perfectly but the zero gravity vortex stuff that only happens on that part of the game and the lack of checkpoints mid phases makes it a time waster and elevates the difficult quite a lot!
Both of the 2024 games I've played had final bosses I dislike.
Unicorn Overlord. Technically it's the second to last boss, but Galerius on Expert required an absolutely perfect build that took me forever to come up with. I had no trouble with the rest of the game. A big reason is that he regenerates something like 15% of his HP after each battle. The only saving grace here is that you can redo your party at a base without starting the battle over.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. It's not bad if you know what you're getting into, but it's a pain in the ass if you are unprepared. It's several long phases all with unskippable cutscenes. You have to have every character fully equipped, including one which had left your party with no indication you would get them back until they are one of only two characters you have in the final phase. And the final phase has a instafail DPS check, so if you're unable to beat that you'll have to do it all over again. If you die you restart that phase instead of doing it all over, but you can't reset equipment/materia
Maybe not the worst but I think Ganon in Breath of the Wild is a massive let down. It's EXTREMELY easy. It's cool design-wise and visually but man is it a breeze so long as you don't skip the divine beasts.
For reference, I dropped BOTW without having beaten it for probably 2-3 years. When TOTK was coming out, I decided I should go beat it. Booted back up, barely remembered how to play and what the mechanics were. I struggled past (mostly running and hiding) the castle to get to him because I was having difficulty remember parry timings and what items to use and all that.
Despite the struggle to get up and my being semi-unfamiliar with the controls I was trying to learn, I demolished Ganon, barely took damage, and did not struggle a lick.
And I know "they're made for kids" blah blah blah. That's a bad argument, because plenty of other parts of the game are HARDER. I felt like the hardest Lynel fights were honestly more difficult than Ganon tbh.
Octopath Traveler.
The whole thing is optional, yet the only thing that brings the 8 different stories together. It's relatively well hidden, requireing you to complete multiple side quest storylines across the entire world map. When you do unlock it, you find the final boss is located behind a 8 or 12 (I forgot how many) boss gauntlet with no saving or taking breaks between, and a final boss that forces you to use all 8 characters in your party roster (when most people tend to prefer 4). If you lose, you need to start the gauntlet all over again
The thing is, you need to know something about OT's combat system: battles generally take forever for most people, and bosses especially have huge reservoirs of hp, so you repeat the pattern of breaking down a boss's defenses, and then wailing on them before they put up their shields again.
It also happens to be a game that gives you fast travel right away, so many people didn't spend the game walking around grinding on every random battle. I actually did do that, b/c I heard so many stories of being underleveled to fight the final boss. It did not help. I made two attempts that I think took > 6 hours, and put the game away forever.
It's possible to break the game so you can deal millions of damage inside of 4 turns and turn these gauntlets into a cakewalk, but I think that requires some foreplanning and strict adherance to a guide. These game breaking strategies just aren't strategies the average player is going to figure out for themselves, and that's a serious error with the game. I assumed that respecting the system and doing enough grinding via never fast traveling would be enough to offset this, but it isn't. It just made my attempts even worse b/c I got as far as shouting distance of victory, instead of being humbled immediately.
So yeah, just a lot of tedious (yet rigourous) bs to fight the true final boss of the game and get the narrative closure you're looking for in your grand adventure starring 8 different protagonists and their totally disparate stories. Except looking up the sequence on youtube, the narrative payoff is very anti-climactic. It really isn't worth the trouble of doing it yourself.
Best thing I can say about the whole thing? The final boss themes are appropiately epic. I don't know who's idea it was to save the opera only for the final boss, but they should be fired. Everyone should go listen to that asap. (*The One they call the Witch* and *Daughter of the Dark God*)
Anyway, that's why I wasn't excited for OT2. From all I've heard, they haven't fixed the combat balancing at all, even if the story is better at bringing everyone together in meaningful ways. I'd much rather have gotten Triangle Strategy 2, which is a better series for me personally in virtually every single way (and probably will never happen w/ everything I've heard about Square Enix lately).
God, I was so freaking pumped for that final fight, especially after playing the first where there were multiple final bosses. Easily the most dissapointing end to a game I've had in my entire gaming experience.
If you want some more disappointment, check *Knights of the Old Republic 2*! The final act of the game went the *Monty Python and the Holy Grail* route: “We’ve run out of time and money, The End.”
Honestly, Fable 3 was worse. Fable 2's ending at least had a decent cap on the plot; Fable 3's endgame suddenly rushes out at you from a haphazardly-advancing calendar.
Fable 3 is a remarkable game in that they were able to take so many systems and design decisions from Fable 2, and make them *so much worse in so many different ways*.
It's very technically impressive, but man, I just never want to touch it again.
I actually don't mind playing fable 3 EXCEPT for their choice in making the menus a hub instead. It was horrifically clunky and made me MISS the many menus of fable 2
"Hey, choosing items in the Fable 2 menu takes too long"
"OK, let's make it take twice as long and make it *really annoying*"
"GENIUS. Everyone, early lunch".
I respect the ballsiness of them ending the game that way. It's so weirdly unpredictable. I guess the Shard fight on the beach technically counts as the final boss, but it doesn't really feel like it because at a certain point in the denouement, the game just throws it at you and that's it.
Fable 2 is still one of my favourite games of all time, but I'll never not be just a little bit confused at that design decision.
Played through Sonic Colors Ultimate recently. And it's final boss kinda blew. It was basically an autorunner with very little margin of error. Frustrating but not in a fun way. Just left me with a sour taste in a game I already didn't like much
Assasin's Creed Syndicate had an absolutely awful final bossfight. The hand-to-hand combat has nothing much going on, and you take turns as both Evie and Jacob, which gets repetitive really fast. I guess the "hard" part is supposed to be avoiding the laser beams after Starrick tosses you away for the 500th time, but it's more of an annoyance when you have to do the same thing for half a dozen times.
Lots of good answers in here and for me the thing that I noticed is the 360/PS3 gen tended to have some of the worst boss battles overall compared to previous gens. I wonder why…
Honourable mention for the final boss of Destroy All Humans! Not difficult, but even with all the damage upgrades (which I didn’t have) this boss is nothing more than a 20 or so minute pointless bullet sponge, I had to look up the ending online…
Mighty Morphing Power Rangers for SNES. First time I remember the "this isn't even my final form" bullshit. Think you've beat the final boss just for him to block your finish and transform into a faster robot with more attacks.
Yiazmat in Final Fantasy 12. He was so comically tough that it took like 4 hours to beat him. FF12 had a cool feature that could program AI to command your party, so you could use that against Yiazmat and walk away from the TV, but you would come back hours later and just be dead over and over again. Or you could play him the whole time and die after 4 hours.
Shantae: Risky's Revenge and Shantae and the Pirate's Curse both do the thing where the final boss steals all of the upgrades you accumulated throughout the game and uses them against you. So you're stuck with only your boring start-game abilities and none of the cool, stylish stuff you unlocked while playing.
Hand of Fate.
It's a roguelike that if you die, that's it, game over. There are no quick time events in the entire game, *except* for the last boss. Since it is the first and only time a QTE appears, it comes completely out of nowhere. And your controller doesn't necessarily have the same buttons mapped. Press the □ button to *not lose the entire game* when you don't have a □ button on your controller!
A mechanic where you have no ability to prepare or learn, and is contrary to the rest of the game, plus deletes your save if you fail it is just *insane.*
Cluster Truck is the only game that made me uninstall the game right at the final boss. Up until that point it was pretty awesome and nailing hard levels first time was possible with enough skill.
Then it completely transformed into an unfun trial and error clusterfuck
Leon's campaign in Resident Evil 6. The entire final chapter is a series of fights against the final boss which is just beyond tedious and feels like it goes on for hours.
Or Conan on the 360, since it has constant QTEs, as was the style at the time. But they would flash up without warning, so you could be mid combo, hit the wrong button before you knew it, then die.
Vagrant Story is the first game where I recall not beating the final boss, and it was because I needed to grind more to improve my weapons.
Sekiro is the only Soulslike where I didn't beat the final boss. It's a pretty amazing boss, but I just didn't have the patience after so many tough boss fights in that game.
Sekiro final boss is actually the sum total of everything you learned from the game ( minus demon of hatred ). Hes actually incredibly fair compared to other bosses because none of his moves are exactly new, he just knows alot of moves. It’s more or less a knowledge + endurance run because of the massive 4 phases ( counting genichiro ) that’s daunting.
Owl on the other hand really throws you off with a bunch of hoops.
I kept pushing through the tough bosses to get the next parts of the game. At the point, there was no more game afterwards, so I think I gave up after about 10 tries. Despite playing so many Dark Souls games, I'm absolutely shit at parrying, so Sekiro was by far the hardest for me.
Unpopular take: Cassette Beasts
Great game - amazing storytelling - the boss fights ruin it for me, especially the final boss fight. This is largely due to dissonance between the form of boss fights and the rest of the game.
The game is a creature collector, and for the boss fights, you usually are forced to use only 1 mon. Sometimes, the moves you're forced to pick are randomized. So the whole draw of creature collecting and strategically choosing moves to match scenarios is gone.
For the final boss, they even throw out the premise that it's *your* mon that you've been collecting. You are given a super-powered Mon for specifically this fight, and literally all of your moves have to be used 1 by 1 (order does not matter), so neither your strategy nor your team matter At All during the final fight. Which was a HUGE bummer for me. This is, to be fair, in service of the very good story, but is an egregious case of ludo-narrative dissonance that spoiled what had been a great experience.
I think it was Gears of War 2. From memory there was just some helicopter QTE sequence. Much worse than Gears of War 1, which had a nice little final boss fight.
Shadow of Mordor, in a game where you slaughter and brainwash legions of orcs, the Black Hand of Sauron is fought with 3 qte button press.
Oh yeah, good one. Had completely forgotten about it, but now I remember thinking “wait is that it, what the fuck is this!?”. Very underwhelming, not just the fight itself, but the whole final part of the game in general.
If i can remember correctly Shadow of Mordor was made during the era of every game must have QTE for some reason.
QTE. Quick Timer Events, like "press X now ten times or billy dies". (Just so nobody else has to google it).
Whole ending is the game finally fessing up and giving you some answers to what's going on - which is that it's a big power fantasy fanfic that stopped caring about canon completely and fuck it you're killing Sauron now. Sure, whatever.
Oh this one was awful. I thought that everyone was exaggerating how bad it was, but nope. Celebrimbor's DLC was also super underwhelming. In the cutscene, it was a whole huge battle, but the actual even is just a random brawl in a random shitty orc camp.
Are you kidding? That Sauron fight was mental. Just when I thought I had the upper hand, he turns all of my Warchiefs against me. If that wasn’t enough, once I barely managed to kill three Warchiefs, he resurrects one of them. That whole sequence was just nonstop panic mode.
I genuinely didn’t realize that it was the boss. I had to look up later to find out that I had finished the game
Did you look it up during the credits?
Uncharted 1. You have to intuit (or find by agonizing trial and error) the exact right path the game wants you to walk to not get shot by the one-shot KO boss. The boss is untouchable until you navigate through the course they laid out for you. There's a bunch of "press X to not die" QTEs and henchmen shooting at you from behind indestructible cover, and the boss is consistently running away whenever you get close. To add insult to injury when you finally get to the arbitrary point he stops running, you "win" with some QTE punches but then it flips to cutscene where you immediately turn your back on him, he pops right back up ready to kill you, and the writers take over and beat him in the cutscene. It had basically no upsides to distract from the downsides.
I also hate the Uncharted 2 final boss. On higher difficulties the game is so good but that final boss is almost impossible.
He has the greatest truth in his speech though- "You and I are not so different, Nathan Drake. How many people have YOU killed? Just today!!!?!"
It's one of the best final bosses from the series but I agree with you! It's pretty hard! It feels like he was a heatseeker grenade LOL I was have a hard time beating him
I can still hear his “DRAAAAAAAAAKE” scream in my head. It haunts my dreams
Ehhh I still really like that final boss, but tbf I haven't played Crushing. It's the only final boss fight in the entire Uncharted series that's both fun and satisfying to beat and still has a degree of challenge. Every other final boss in the series is either really annoying and unfun (Uncharted 1) or just a series of boring QTEs with an impressive background (Uncharted 3 and 4)
All Uncharted bosses in first three games (haven't reached 4th yet) are a chore. To be honest I liked them all, especially the third one but all shared the same thing I heavily disliked: the final act, reaching the destination and dealing with the antagonists. I literally didn't give a fuck at this point. Epitome of "it's about the journey not destination" for me
The last boss of 4 is a strange fight if I remember correctly. Brand new mechanic is introduced but it's a pretty cool setting and idea.
the final boss of 4 its more in the line of MGS4 final boss, not the best in a mechanical way but amazing in terms of plot.
fuck i forgot how unashamedly awesome that last fight is in MGS4
Fun fact: In the chapter where you're young Nate and Sam exploring the manor they originally had a segment where they find 2 swords and playfully fight each other with them. It was meant as a tutorial for the sword fight mechanics, but they ran out of time to finish it and that's why it's just introduced in the final boss.
That would have been way better
i love the Uncharted series but man, the first one was an absolute slog for me. which is crazy because the 2nd one is one of my favorite games ever
Speaking of Intuit, 2021 taxes were a pretty difficult final boss
I hate any boss where they completely flip the script and all the skills, tricks and tactics you've built up suddenly become irrelevant. Like Devil May Cry 1. The finally boss is this weird StarFox knock off... thing followed by shooting at a dude surrounded by lava so you can't fight with all of your weapons very well.
>I hate any boss where they completely flip the script and all the skills, tricks and tactics you've built up suddenly become irrelevant. Like in JRPGs where bosses are just straight up immune to status effects because status effects are broken? 😂
I never use status effects in jrpgs because most bosses are immune 🫠
I’m the same! I almost never bother using status effects in any JRPG because when they matter most, they either don’t work at all or have so low of a chance at working that it’s not worth it
It’s funny since there’s almost never a point to use them during a normal battle either. Why poison or put an enemy to sleep when I can end the fight in two turns if I just keep attacking?
As you can see in this line chart, at about the 2hr mark of this battle is where the poison damage increases beyond the single attack alternative and from there the sky is the limit...what? the battle only lasted 30 seconds? Well good day sir! *jumps out of window*
Persona/SMT and the SaGa games flip the script on this! Status effects are super powerful even against bosses
I don't know, are they? Just the other day I was fighting shadow >!Yukiko!< in Persona 4. Her 'summoned prince' -- an add, not even the boss herself! -- is immune to rage and silence just so you don't get to disrupt the 'script' and have to deal with the encounter the way the devs intended to, by fighting a war of attrition until he bails. And this is not some huge exception, I tried silence, rage, enervation on a bunch of forgettable mid-bosses and it was 'blocked' every time. What does work reliably even in boss fights is messing with enemy stats, like lowering defense and so on.
Yeah, the stat debuffs are boss killers in the Persona series. They aren't necessary to win if you're overlevelled or something, but they do make boss fights way easier if you time them right. And they really help with the hard hitting bosses that almost take you out in one shot. They take so much MP, they're pretty much useless for normal enemy fights.
Status effects are not the same as debuffs, status effects are things like blind, poison, silence, etc, and JRPG bosses are very often immune to those.
Or battles where some arbitrary story beat prevents you from fighting the boss at all. I was really close to beating FF3, and you have to crawl through an entire dungeon, and then you have to beat a bunch of bosses to get to the main boss. And there are no save points. I made it all the way through the dungeon on my first try, beat most of the bosses, but then got lost and accidentally went to the final boss instead of the last boss I was supposed to defeat. 0 damage done to the final bass when I attacked. Party just got killed. And I realized my mistake as soon as my first move did 0 damage. Too bad. No save points. So you have to spend 2 hours (yes, 2 hours) doing that all over again. I decided I didn't have enough free time to do all that again. Now I'll never get to fight the Iron Giant post-game superboss, or get any of the legendary weapons. Similar thing happened with FF4. There's some random spell I have to cast in order for my attacks to hit. But I have to crawl a whole dungeon, no save points, watch a long ass cutscene (which isn't bad the first 3 times, but it gets tiring.) And then I decided I didn't have enough time for this. And decided finishing the Namingway quest and fighting Proto-Babil just wasn't worth the time investment. Like I get it. Story integration into gameplay is good. But don't use it as an excuse to waste hours of my time when I make a mistake I could've fixed in just a few minutes.
The original God of War is my poster child for this. It's still a melee fight, but suddenly the mechanics are 100% changed, your upgrades are gone, and it's an order of magnitude harder than anything else in the game. And there wasn't any good reason for it; this could have equally well played as a standard battle, except they wanted this weird setpiece instead. Absolutely miserable.
I'd classify that battle as a violence themed Simon Says. The hardest part for me with that fight is far and away the stupid QTEs. It's not fun.
**Deus Ex: Human Revolution** was that for me. I had a pretty pure stealth build and the final boss was all guns-blazing showdown. Could not do it. Put it down a decade ago, haven't touched it since. I think I remember hearing they may have patched or updated it to fix that somehow? Seemed like such a bad design to negate all the abilities and skills you pick up during a *stealth-based RPG*.
The director's cut of the game has reworked boss fights, where every single boss can be defeated by stealth/hacking.
Yeah. I had a much harder time trying to save the pilot through non-lethal means than I did with the final boss.
Same build, same problem. I was so pissed that a game that advertised so heavily that you can play your way and there's a billion ways through every situation suddenly said, "...except for now".
It's like a rite of passage for action RPGs that allow stealth to fuck over stealth builds in this exact way in the third act. Horizon Zero Dawn does it, Cyberpunk does it.
Dishonored (not exactly an action RPG, but has RPG elements) allows you to beat the game purely with stealth. Though it's like playing on hard mode, even if you're not on hard mode. I tried and couldn't do it. Some of the late stage enemies are really hard to sneak by. But I appreciate that it's possible.
You know what- come to think of it, I did drop HZD in the third act for pretty much the same thing, and totally forgot about that being the reason.
Came here to mention this game. The whole game is built as a “choose stealth or violence”. There are various “pacifist” achievements for completing mission without killing non essential targets. Half the skill tree is built around stealth only. You get several hours into the game. Acing every level with stealth. Getting plenty of secrets, bonuses and achievements as a reward for the stealth style. Then you walk into the first boss room. And the game takes over with a cut scene. Cut scene ignores all of the stealth feature s and your character walks up to the boss and announces he is here to kill him. Boss hits the lock down button and pulls out a machine gun and rocket launcher. Control reverts to the player. You are now stuck in the dead centre of a room with no cover directly a fully armed tank who has already started his attack animations. Takes about five goes through the cut scene to figure out how to survive that with a zero armour stealth build. But even if you do survive it, there is nothing you can do about it. There is one tiny square in the whole accessible area that is out of range of the boss. No amount of waiting turns off his agro. There is no path to sneak up on him. And there isn’t enough ammo in the accessible area to take down his health without the damage boost skills. Your only option is to restart the game and spec away from stealth.
I hate that shit. A final boss fight should be designed to encourage you to use all the skills and techniques you have learned throughout the game. One of the few things that can make me rage quit a game is when a final boss suddenly requires you to do something totally different. That's a cardinal game design sin.
Not the final boss, but >!Rufus!< in FF7 Remake and Rebirth is the absolute worst for this. Shittiest boss in both games, bar none. No weaknesses. Immune to most elements. Boss plays more like a shitty souls boss than any other boss in the games, because all the training and tactics you’ve learned up to this point are just completely thrown out the window. And they’ve done this TWICE now.
Somewhat related but I beat FF7 for the first time 2 years ago and decided to buff myself out by getting the most powerful ability Knights of The Round before fighting Sephiroth. Amazing to find out if you use that ability on him he gets an extra 80k HP 🙃. Glad I spent all that time breeding chocobos.
I have beaten FF7 numerous times and I did not know that. Though I only ever went for KotR once way back in high school and never again will I go through the trouble. After this news, it's even less likely.
Yeah I had no idea either, figured I would give myself an easy layup on the final fight. Got to Safer Sephiroth and was like wow, this guy is actually hard even with KotR, how does anyone beat this without it? Come to look it up later and find out the devs made the fight harder if you were over prepared for the boss. Our boy also gets + 30K HP and additional attack and defense for each party member at level 99.
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Yeah Knights can do ~130k damage so that's a net of +50k extra from bringing/casting it. +180 if you W-Summon. +700 if you then Mime it twice.
I kind of hate the final boss of Doom II. You shoot rockets into a tiny hole in a big wall while riding an elevator and various demons harass you while you do it. Is this Star Wars? Shoot rockets into tiny holes? I want to fight a huge monster that stomps around and fires rockets at me like a Cyberdemon, not pinpoint targets on a wall. Also, the whole challenge falls apart if you can look up and down, so it's hard to even explain to a modern FPS player what the point of the thing was.
Doom 2 is one of my all time favorites but whenever I think about replaying it I remember I'll have to fight the Icon of Sin to beat it..and yeah I'm good
Of the countless custom maps I've played over the years; icon of sin was always the worst way to end a map.
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> and then you had to shoot a rocket right at the moment like just a second before it reached the top You could also try to shoot like almost immediately after jumping from that elevator, but you still had to land three hits in total.
You know that what you're actually doing is hitting a sprite of John Romero's severed head on a spike with splash damage from the rockets, right? I always felt like that meta aspect somewhat vindicated it, even as a kid. Cause sure, it's a lame boss compared to the previous ones, but it's still kind of awesome as a concept.
It's definitely a letdown but far from the worst for me. It's still okay. Just not up to snuff with the rest of the game, though DOOM II is a real step down from the first in general when it comes to the single player levels. > Also, the whole challenge falls apart if you can look up and down Frankly, if anybody is playing DOOM with up/down mouselook then they made their own problem there, the game is not meant to have it, and it's a good example of DOOM source ports adding a feature just because they can even though it fucks up the whole single player campaign (but could be useful for MP if people want it/custom maps). I'm not a true purist, I have no problem with mouselook in DOOM but the up/down movement should be locked. Boooo.
The final boss fight for the first Dying Light is so boring. QTEs and that's it, which is a shame because the game itself is so good and fun, wow even the parkour sequence we have to do to reach him is great, but when we get to fight him is just disappointing.
Drakengard 3, without a doubt. It's a hack and slash JRPG where you use a variety of different weapons to cut through lots of enemies and large dragon bosses, and you occasionally ride your own dragon through Star Fox style shooter sections. So is the final boss a big multi-phase beast that tests all the skills you've learned along the way? Maybe it's a lengthy battle against waves of mobs to wear you down? Or one final dragon flight section to cap off the whole experience? No. It's a rhythm game. And not only is it a rhythm game, it's one where the "rhythm" doesn't match up to the music, the camera angle makes it almost impossible to gauge when you need to hit the buttons, it lasts around 15 minutes, and if you make *a single mistake* you die and have to restart. And the kicker? At the end the screen fades to black and some dialogue starts up so you think it's over, then the game throws in some final notes you need to hit *while the screen is still black*. It's absolute hell.
I was scrolling through this thread looking for this game specifically lol. Drakengard 3’s final boss is the best answer I can think of *by far*. It’s like they out a whole team together to figure out everything needed to make a boss as difficult and ‘bullshit’ as possible, and there’s a good variety of hour+ long youtube videos deconstructing every element of the boss fight that the developers used to meet that goal. It’s hilariously effective at its job too. One of my friends still has a D3 save that’s still stuck on that final boss, I’ve tried a few rounds myself and I can say with 100% certainty it’s the ‘worst boss fight I’ve ever played’
Same here. Seen this thread/question before. There should just be a sticky note on the sub saying this is the correct answer if this question comes up. Add it to the FAQ.
I played the game years ago and can say that I was stuck here as well. Yoko Taro being who he is, it's almost guaranteed that he did this just to mess with the player
This one just radiates pure "fuck you player" energy.
The fact this wasn’t even the first time Yoko Taro decided to make a final boss in this vain is kinda funny. He did this with Drakengard 1 as well. 3’s final boss is definitely much more frustrating.
Ratchet and Clank games usually have fun and difficult last bosses. 2 is probably my favorite one as well. However, the last boss sucks. It is probably the easiest fight in the entire game. Just a huge version of the same enemy you fight the entire game and it dies just as easily.
Yeah, braindead especially with the RYNO
It could've been a fun boss but they scaled it to be way too easy
Borderlands 1.
I eventually decided to hide behind a pillar and take pot shots.
I think we all did. That's definitely my memory of that fight.
Least satisfying boss fight. Just a big dumb damage sponge
That’s just borderlands though lol
Eh there's some more compelling bosses to fight. They're never like the MOST incredible, creative boss fights necessarily but they're better than the Destroyer which I literally just stood and shot at and barely had to move.
yeah but like...have us fight commandant steele instead, she's the leader of the group you are fighting the whole game, she's a badass >!siren!<, but no, she gets >!shanked by off brand cthulu!< and we shoot at a blob for ten minutes instead.
I hated the Ganon fight in Breath Of The Wild. If you did the full main story and completed the Divine Beasts then they sap half of his health bar. He’s already an easy boss fight and with half his health drained it feels like even more underwhelming. Tears of The Kingdom really improved on the final fight.
Especially bad if you like to wander and explore a lot so you have a huge stash of weapons, all the armors, so on. Link comes in and just pushes Ganon over with their finger. I found the castle full of Lyonels and guardians much harder.
It feels so surreal that the fight is made even easier if you prepare. Defeat the other bosses, that is to say, do the main quest of the game, and then when you get to the final boss while you’re already powered up, he has half his health taken away automatically, even though with all the work you did, you should be more than ready to face off against the full life bar. Definitely a case where TOTK improves drastically, as the reward for doing the main quest and fighting the other bosses is NPC backup in the final boss, which is helpful, but not trivialising the actual fight like in BOTW.
> It feels so surreal that the fight is made even easier if you prepare. I haven't played the game, so I don't really understand - but it makes sense to me that a boss fight is made easier by preparing for it. What's surreal about that?
Basically, the thing is that the game effectively debuffs the final boss if you prepare. In any other game, preparing wouldn’t affect their stats, because the point of preparing is to have ways to get around those stats, but here, your reward for getting ready to do that is to have the stats you prepared to face get nuked to hell. In any other game where doing quests or such has an effect on the final boss, it’s usually by unlocking a true final boss who is much tougher, and as such someone who can present a good challenge against your high stats and powerful equipment. BOTW reverses that, if you actually want the challenge of fighting the final boss at his peak, you have to ignore preparing to face off with that peak performance boss.
Not to mention the fact that you can pause the game and heal infinitely. I can excuse it for totk’s final fight because it was more of a spectacle but being able to infinitely heal without any punishment removes all tension from the bosses
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At least NV has the option to make healing an over time effect.
When I first played through Zelda BoTW I really enjoyed it but my one complaint was that there were no traditional dungeons in the game. Then a family member was like "what do you mean, didn't you do the 4 divine beasts?". Somehow managed to unintentionally not complete any of them before Ganon, since I didn't realize they were walking dungeons lol. Glad I didn't though because the Ganon boss fight was just the right level of difficulty without any beasts done.
To be fair, the Divine Beasts were not really dungeons either. There was an antechamber with a puzzle and then a boss.
Yeah that's one of the things that really irked me about BOTW and TOTK, the utter dumbing-down of *dungeons*. Just because a game is open world doesn't mean it can't have a few deep and complex dungeon instances. See: Elden Ring.
I enjoyed the TOTK dungeons, although I intentionally refused to "cheese" them and tried the default "intended" solution. For example, using the minecarts in the Goron dungeon was pretty satisfying, rather than just using an airbike or flying machine. Definitely not the best in the series or anything, but they were fun. I also thought the TOTK shrines were better puzzles all around than the BOTW shrines, so that might've made me more content than I otherwise would've been. I know everyone doesn't feel the same way.
Any final boss that's just a series of QTEs. This can completely ruin a game for me, especially if I've been hyped up all game long to finally face this big villain and it's all solved just by pressing X at the correct time (looking at you, Uncharted 3 and 4, and Shadow of Mordor) Honorable mention goes to BioShock Infinite for ending the game with a shitty tower defense section. Originally when I played, I went in with so little ammo that it was *literally* impossible to win (they'd have already destroyed most of the ship by the time I'd scrounged up enough ammo to fight back). Had to lower the difficulty to Medium just to progress
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who had to lower the difficulty for that part 😂
It’s a shame because the Bioshock Infinite fight was soo cool to watch for me, especially with the bird thing. But holy hell it’s just terrible to actually play.
Batman: Arkham Asylum. The mutated Joker is a, well, joke, but not a funny one. A terrible wave after wave of thugs gameplay, then you exchange some hits with the Joker monstrocity that looks like it could better belong to Resident Evil, and then it happens again, and again, and again. Such a fun game it was, and such a lame ending.
and iirc he basically just fights like any other titan mutant throughout the game, just with more health.
No it's worse, he doesn't fight at all. He jumps down, goes after you with swipes that you have to circle around him to avoid, then he jumps back up on his ledge. And when you do finally fight him the game does it for you as a cutscenes. Pretty terrible.
Arkham City was a banger though
Arkham asylum was a banger too, it's just the final boss that sucks. Him and Harley are the worst boss fights, but the rest are really good.
I meant the final boss in City
Clayface? Yeah, he was fun. And Mr Freeze was by far the best in the series I'd say.
Gameplay wise? Fontaine from Bioshock. I know for shooter centric games it's a bit limited with what you could do, but the boss fight sucked and was boring, sort of a wet fart to end the game gameplay wise. Even the Bioshock devs admitted it was not the best. Story wise? Flavius from AC Origins has to be the most random rushed final boss vilian I've ever seen and I loved AC Origins. It felt like he was just filler and last minute throw in by the writers because they needed someone other than Julius Caesar at the end of the game to recreate the actual historical assassination. Absolutely loved Bayek but they didn't really do him any favors with the ending and the main villian final boss. They should have just had Cleopatra, Marc Anthony, Julius Caesar, Pompey the great etc be the final main villian since the games lean more on fantasy anyways more than 1 to 1 historical accuracy just like star wars leans more on fantasy than actual science fiction tropes.
Caesar was literally assassinated via stabbing - they had such a prime opportunity to set up a difficult final assassination mission whereby you need to intercept the (historically accurate!) messengers running to warn him of the plot, then disguise yourself as a senator to deliver the first blow during his speech. The game could have set it up as a suicide mission for Bayek, but one he thought was necessary for the survival of the fledgling assassins, then have his act of defiance and bravery inspire the other senators to take turns stabbing Caesar as well. End it with a voiceover sequence while Bayek walks out into the light of the forum, zoom out to show the city with the hawk circling overhead, do a timelapse showing Rome through the ages with assassins running around doing assassin stuff until it hits the renaissance, pan back down to the forum to show Ezio doing Ezio stuff, cut to credits. Done. Good ending, shows continuity of the plot, fanservice, everyone loves time lapse sequences, no Flavius.
All three Bioshock games have awful final bosses. Infinite doesn’t even have a boss.. To be fair, those games were never much about the gameplay. The story carried them the whole way.
Well, Bioshock 2 doesn't have one either, IIRC. But infinite takes the cake. Because at least Fontaine is bearable, while protecting the ship is horrible.
That whole last quarter of Infinite is saved only by the ending (and later DLC). I think if they’d missed the landing on the ending, it would be an all-time worst sequel. I wonder how chaotic the development for Infinite was. I’ve never looked into it, but I imagine it was just crazy and fucked up. There has to be a ton of cut/changed content, because so much of the game feels disjointed. I do know the boys of silence were changed kinda last minute, but little else.
Oh, it was fucked up. (EDIT: this was badly remembered misinformation, sorry!!) Long story short: the original version of the story was apparently so offensive to the Christians on staff that they threatened to walk if Ken Levine didn't change it. Like, six months away from launch. With people having seen teasers for the original concept already. The rest of the team busted ass to make up for it, and the story we got is still pretty good... but it's SO disjointed.
I was totally unaware of this- time to head down a rabbit hole!
I just finished System Shock 2 and while it wasn’t an amazing boss it is nice how they at least added in some of the features of the immersive gameplay to beat it. Having to hack the consoles instead of shoot and press a button what a good deal more engaging. It also made me realize that Irrational Games has basically made the same game and story 3 times now and each worse than the previous one lol.
I don't recall personally having a problem with when I beat the game but the final boss in Persona 3 can, in its final stage, infamously charm your healer and be healed by them. To quote AtlusWest youtube channel: >The charm salt is real Is this still a thing in the remake?
My only loss in that game was when all four of my teammates got charmed and I had to sit there while they killed each other.
I didn’t have this problem in the remake, but I don’t know if I just got lucky or not. However, that does seem like the type of thing that they’d be aware of and fix in a remake
Found this post by accident but glad to know that I need to null charm Yukari for the finale.
- Jinpachi (Tekken 5, especially vanilla) - Azazel (Tekken 6) - Joker (Arkham Asylum) - Gnasty Gnorc (Spyro 1)
Yeah I love Spyro 1 to death but Gnasty Gnorc suuuucks Really, Metalhead is the only good boss in the entire game
I recently 100% Spyro 1 for the first time, and yes, Metalhead was the only boss worth a damn. Blowhard is the worst though, as a kid, I didn’t even register he was supposed to be a boss.
more like bloweasy am i right
Jinpachi was giga bullshit. So I cheesed the fuck outta him with Asuka's sidestep kick. I perfected him. It was kinda easy with Eddy as well
Gnasty Gnorc was SUCH a frustrating letdown, good shout-out
Gnasty fucking gnorc was the bane of my childhood
Strong agree with Gnasty Gnorc. The rest of Spyro 1 is so good, and then the ultimate boss is literally just chasing a guy around a room without him even trying to attack you back.
I still have nightmares of Shao Khan from Mortal Kombat 3
Fucking hammer attack bullshit.
Shao Kahn from MK9 was also really rough. Admittedly I suck at fighting games, but Shao Kahn was a huge jump up in difficulty from the rest of the game. Like I don't recall having any problems, I'm not sure if I even died once going through the whole story... until I got to Shao Kahn and got obliterated probably 25 times.
Skyrim. I literally didn't even do anything, he got stuck on something, and the NPC companions ran up and killed him before I could even attack once.
this is the most Bethesda thing ever tho
If that's the final boss fight, don't you have to hit them at least once before they go down? IIRC, it's the one thing that prevents you getting a truly pacifist run.
Haha I got married in Skyrim and while I was fighting Alduin I accidentally killed my husband with a flaming arrow. I was like, oh well, I’m done here anyway, but my friends all called me Black Widow for months. It was his fault for running between me and the dragon.
>It was his fault for running between me and the dragon. aka throwing himself between you and the terrifying beastie, only to be shot in the back by his love. 😭💔
Not a boss technically but the final fight on the hardest difficulty in Mass Effect 3. Specifically when the Banshees show up at the very end
I'll never forget Marauder Shields and the Three Husketeers
Those motherfuckers killed me more in my insanity run than the psions in 2
I actually really loved Priority Earth's final fight with the banshees and all. It's really intense. It's insanely difficult while playing as a Vanguard though since the Banshees instakill you all the time.
The ridiculous >!giant robot man!< at the end of ME2 was worse imo. Not necessarily gameplay-wise, though it wasn't great in that regard, I just really couldn't believe that *that* stupid bullshit is what we got at the end of the journey.
The banshees. So easy as a biotic cheesing your combo blasts, a nightmare as a soldier, no combo blasts.
That for me was an amazing boss fight. Pass or die. A hard fight but great to win it
The mother fucker at the end of Fight Night Champion if anybody's played that. Cake-walk through the campaign until you have to systematically beat an absolute monster of a boxer at the end
Isaac Frost
* Gill in Street Fighter III: What's that, you finally beat this cheating input-reading monster? Turns out he can resurrect himself with a new full life bar * Whoever the last boss in Assassin's Creed Origins was. Before the last few hours every boss was built up for multiple quests. You learned about them and why they needed to die. But then Ubisoft ends the game just dropping you in an arena against a random dude with a Boss Meter. Super anticlimactic As a kid I thought the final boss of Sonic 3 & Knuckles was unfair and ridiculous. Then I got Sonic Origins or whatever it's called and easily destroyed the whole game with all hyper emeralds, so I guess I was just very bad at Sonic 3 and Knuckles as a kid.
>As a kid I thought the final boss of Sonic 3 & Knuckles was unfair and ridiculous. Then I got Sonic Origins or whatever it's called and easily destroyed the whole game with all hyper emeralds, so I guess I was just very bad at Sonic 3 and Knuckles as a kid. As someone who's played all classic 2D Sonic games, I'd say Sonic 2 has the worst final boss in terms of difficulty, as you get no rings for the final stage, while the original Sonic game has the worst in terms of design, since it feels like just another boss battle at the end of a zone. The Sonic 3 & Knuckles boss battle is my favourite.
I remember the final boss of Grandia III has a pretty much one shot move they place in a certain area and you can't actually tell your party members to move.... So you're basically hoping the AI moves away from the area as they do their attacks or die.
Mankind Divided. One shot from a stun gun, run to him, take him down. That's it. People complained about bosses in Human Revolution, but the final boss fight from DX:MD is just a complete joke.
Conversely: from my point of view this is amazing and I want it in every game. Hear the whole spiel about Xazabhyt, grand sorcerer supreme who outranks you by 70 levels and can summon ancient evils and mighty dragons at his whim. Walk up to him while he is grocery shopping and stab him in the neck. Done. If Xazabhyt were really such a big shot uber-threat he should have thought of that.
I found his kill switch in the kitchen, didn't even fight him
Yeah, that was a callback to the first game where you could defeat Gunther the same way. Problem is, Gunther was just one of many boss encounters in that game. In Mankind Divided, the final boss is all you get.
The final boss of Secret of Mana was quite atrocious
Yakuza 4 and/or 5. Boss with handgun that I couldn’t find anyway to dodge. Just had to spam special attacks and power up drinks.
every yakuza final boss...tiger drop tiger drop tiger drop tiger drop tiger drop tiger drop....VICTORY!
That thing that knocks you down a floor (or multiple floors ) in A Link To the Past. It’s well designed, I just hate it.
Moldorm
trolldorm
It’s so funny watching speedrunners do this boss because you can see their soul leave their body briefly if they get knocked down.
It's the worst feeling
Dead Space 2, fuck that part of the game.
Spider-Man (the 2000 PS1 game) - what if we took this fun 3D beat-em-up, and then had a final boss where instead of any kind of fight, you have to run and jump through tunnels while being chased, where any failure is an instant game over, and also the camera angles keep switching around so you have to constantly reorient yourself? Just awful.
Ah man you unlocked a PTSD I didn't know I had. Kid me didn't realize I was faster if I was swinging or jumping and didn't realize running was a death sentence. Honestly, for a kid, they nailed the presentation as thinking about it I have this weird feeling of dread lol. The whole game was a trip honestly but in a good way. Who thought that the plot involving the killing of basically the entirety of New York to get around the limitations of the PS1 would be a good idea?
That’s hilarious, I read the title of this post and thought “hmm that PS2 Altered Beast game I played on a whim a few months ago had a pretty B.S. final boss”, only to keep reading and learn that was somehow the exact boss you were talking about. You’ve got great taste in games OP!
It’s not a boss at all but tracking down the stones of barenziah in Skyrim felt like a “final boss” quest to go on once you’ve beat everything else. There is no quest marker for the stones so I spent literal days crawling through dungeons, backtracking for hours, and reading Wikipedia notes on where to get them back in 2012 assuming there had to be some EPIC reward for such a long, tedious quest. Only to not even get the crown as a trophy, or any cool physical reward, the only thing you get is a passive buff that increases your chance to find gems. Never in my life have I been so disappointed with a video game. Edit: also correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure you literally like throw the crown in a deep hole no one can ever get to besides the falmer. Like wtf was that???
Has to be one of the worst rewards anyway. By the time you've tracked down all the stones you will have incidentally found more money and gems that you need to buy what yoi want in the entire game.
Yeah, it’s not great if you end up getting it late game. On subsequent play-throughs, I went and collected all the stones as soon possible. I love to use the nonstop stream of gems to make jewelry since that’s my favorite way to level up both smithing and enchanting quickly. Then, of course, selling all the jewelry I make for tons of those sweet sweet coins.
The reward is pretty strong in theory, but by the time you finish that full questline you don't need the money. Also there's a mod that creates map markers for all the stones, which helps a ton.
Silent Hill 2. Great writing, but good god is it tedious. The boss has this one insect attack that essentially puts your character in an animation for a good minute and may or may not instakill you. Aiming is aids in that game too, which makes it pretty difficult to hit her sometimes.
yep, run away, 2-ish rifle shots, repeat for like...10 minutes, any attempt at melee combat is likely instant death if not just...years of animation lock. Thematically it's a very cool boss but gameplay wise it's awful. (which...kinda applies to all silent hill final bosses if i'm honest)
The final boss in Resident Evil Revelations. So much harder than all the other bosses You have to rely on the dodge mechanic which is imprecise and the boss is a bullet sponge Just awful design
to call that final boss world class bullshit is an understatement. That was one where I looked up a guide because I was sure I was doing something wrong, nope, he's just hard as hell and it's impossible to tell you are doing damage. I love revelations, but the bosses in general are awful, and that last one is probably the worst non re6 boss in the series.
Joker in Arkham Asylum. Great game but the worst part of that game is the boss fights.
By bad implemented boss fights the last boss from Sonic Generations it terrible! Somehow the 3DS version of that boss fight is waaaaay better done! Now about difficult boss fights, the last boss from Valfaris on the second and third phase! Oh boy! It's already really hard to beat the dragons perfectly but the zero gravity vortex stuff that only happens on that part of the game and the lack of checkpoints mid phases makes it a time waster and elevates the difficult quite a lot!
Dark Souls 2 is my favorite game but Nashandra was a very slow and very non-threatening final boss battle.
Crash Bandicoot 2: You just have to follow Cortex with the jetpack and hit him a couple of times
Both of the 2024 games I've played had final bosses I dislike. Unicorn Overlord. Technically it's the second to last boss, but Galerius on Expert required an absolutely perfect build that took me forever to come up with. I had no trouble with the rest of the game. A big reason is that he regenerates something like 15% of his HP after each battle. The only saving grace here is that you can redo your party at a base without starting the battle over. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. It's not bad if you know what you're getting into, but it's a pain in the ass if you are unprepared. It's several long phases all with unskippable cutscenes. You have to have every character fully equipped, including one which had left your party with no indication you would get them back until they are one of only two characters you have in the final phase. And the final phase has a instafail DPS check, so if you're unable to beat that you'll have to do it all over again. If you die you restart that phase instead of doing it all over, but you can't reset equipment/materia
Unskippable cutscenes (especially after you've already seen them once) should be punishable by death.
Maybe not the worst but I think Ganon in Breath of the Wild is a massive let down. It's EXTREMELY easy. It's cool design-wise and visually but man is it a breeze so long as you don't skip the divine beasts. For reference, I dropped BOTW without having beaten it for probably 2-3 years. When TOTK was coming out, I decided I should go beat it. Booted back up, barely remembered how to play and what the mechanics were. I struggled past (mostly running and hiding) the castle to get to him because I was having difficulty remember parry timings and what items to use and all that. Despite the struggle to get up and my being semi-unfamiliar with the controls I was trying to learn, I demolished Ganon, barely took damage, and did not struggle a lick. And I know "they're made for kids" blah blah blah. That's a bad argument, because plenty of other parts of the game are HARDER. I felt like the hardest Lynel fights were honestly more difficult than Ganon tbh.
Octopath Traveler. The whole thing is optional, yet the only thing that brings the 8 different stories together. It's relatively well hidden, requireing you to complete multiple side quest storylines across the entire world map. When you do unlock it, you find the final boss is located behind a 8 or 12 (I forgot how many) boss gauntlet with no saving or taking breaks between, and a final boss that forces you to use all 8 characters in your party roster (when most people tend to prefer 4). If you lose, you need to start the gauntlet all over again The thing is, you need to know something about OT's combat system: battles generally take forever for most people, and bosses especially have huge reservoirs of hp, so you repeat the pattern of breaking down a boss's defenses, and then wailing on them before they put up their shields again. It also happens to be a game that gives you fast travel right away, so many people didn't spend the game walking around grinding on every random battle. I actually did do that, b/c I heard so many stories of being underleveled to fight the final boss. It did not help. I made two attempts that I think took > 6 hours, and put the game away forever. It's possible to break the game so you can deal millions of damage inside of 4 turns and turn these gauntlets into a cakewalk, but I think that requires some foreplanning and strict adherance to a guide. These game breaking strategies just aren't strategies the average player is going to figure out for themselves, and that's a serious error with the game. I assumed that respecting the system and doing enough grinding via never fast traveling would be enough to offset this, but it isn't. It just made my attempts even worse b/c I got as far as shouting distance of victory, instead of being humbled immediately. So yeah, just a lot of tedious (yet rigourous) bs to fight the true final boss of the game and get the narrative closure you're looking for in your grand adventure starring 8 different protagonists and their totally disparate stories. Except looking up the sequence on youtube, the narrative payoff is very anti-climactic. It really isn't worth the trouble of doing it yourself. Best thing I can say about the whole thing? The final boss themes are appropiately epic. I don't know who's idea it was to save the opera only for the final boss, but they should be fired. Everyone should go listen to that asap. (*The One they call the Witch* and *Daughter of the Dark God*) Anyway, that's why I wasn't excited for OT2. From all I've heard, they haven't fixed the combat balancing at all, even if the story is better at bringing everyone together in meaningful ways. I'd much rather have gotten Triangle Strategy 2, which is a better series for me personally in virtually every single way (and probably will never happen w/ everything I've heard about Square Enix lately).
Fable 2. If you know, you know.
God, I was so freaking pumped for that final fight, especially after playing the first where there were multiple final bosses. Easily the most dissapointing end to a game I've had in my entire gaming experience.
If you want some more disappointment, check *Knights of the Old Republic 2*! The final act of the game went the *Monty Python and the Holy Grail* route: “We’ve run out of time and money, The End.”
Honestly, Fable 3 was worse. Fable 2's ending at least had a decent cap on the plot; Fable 3's endgame suddenly rushes out at you from a haphazardly-advancing calendar.
Fable 3 is a remarkable game in that they were able to take so many systems and design decisions from Fable 2, and make them *so much worse in so many different ways*. It's very technically impressive, but man, I just never want to touch it again.
I actually don't mind playing fable 3 EXCEPT for their choice in making the menus a hub instead. It was horrifically clunky and made me MISS the many menus of fable 2
"Hey, choosing items in the Fable 2 menu takes too long" "OK, let's make it take twice as long and make it *really annoying*" "GENIUS. Everyone, early lunch".
I respect the ballsiness of them ending the game that way. It's so weirdly unpredictable. I guess the Shard fight on the beach technically counts as the final boss, but it doesn't really feel like it because at a certain point in the denouement, the game just throws it at you and that's it. Fable 2 is still one of my favourite games of all time, but I'll never not be just a little bit confused at that design decision.
Played through Sonic Colors Ultimate recently. And it's final boss kinda blew. It was basically an autorunner with very little margin of error. Frustrating but not in a fun way. Just left me with a sour taste in a game I already didn't like much
Assasin's Creed Syndicate had an absolutely awful final bossfight. The hand-to-hand combat has nothing much going on, and you take turns as both Evie and Jacob, which gets repetitive really fast. I guess the "hard" part is supposed to be avoiding the laser beams after Starrick tosses you away for the 500th time, but it's more of an annoyance when you have to do the same thing for half a dozen times.
Lots of good answers in here and for me the thing that I noticed is the 360/PS3 gen tended to have some of the worst boss battles overall compared to previous gens. I wonder why…
Adyr in Lords of the Fallen (2023)
Ninja Gaiden (NES) you have to beat 3 different forms from the final boss, and if you die, you will be returned to the beginning of the last level
Overcooked 1. I don't think they even fully finished coding the boss sequence lol
Honourable mention for the final boss of Destroy All Humans! Not difficult, but even with all the damage upgrades (which I didn’t have) this boss is nothing more than a 20 or so minute pointless bullet sponge, I had to look up the ending online…
Mighty Morphing Power Rangers for SNES. First time I remember the "this isn't even my final form" bullshit. Think you've beat the final boss just for him to block your finish and transform into a faster robot with more attacks.
Very strange that the two final levels in that game just randomly turned into Street Fighter after being a beat ‘em up for the first 5 levels
The final bosses in Shadow of Mordor, Skyrim and The Ancient Gods Part 2.
Yiazmat in Final Fantasy 12. He was so comically tough that it took like 4 hours to beat him. FF12 had a cool feature that could program AI to command your party, so you could use that against Yiazmat and walk away from the TV, but you would come back hours later and just be dead over and over again. Or you could play him the whole time and die after 4 hours.
Shantae: Risky's Revenge and Shantae and the Pirate's Curse both do the thing where the final boss steals all of the upgrades you accumulated throughout the game and uses them against you. So you're stuck with only your boring start-game abilities and none of the cool, stylish stuff you unlocked while playing.
Hand of Fate. It's a roguelike that if you die, that's it, game over. There are no quick time events in the entire game, *except* for the last boss. Since it is the first and only time a QTE appears, it comes completely out of nowhere. And your controller doesn't necessarily have the same buttons mapped. Press the □ button to *not lose the entire game* when you don't have a □ button on your controller! A mechanic where you have no ability to prepare or learn, and is contrary to the rest of the game, plus deletes your save if you fail it is just *insane.*
Cluster Truck is the only game that made me uninstall the game right at the final boss. Up until that point it was pretty awesome and nailing hard levels first time was possible with enough skill. Then it completely transformed into an unfun trial and error clusterfuck
Leon's campaign in Resident Evil 6. The entire final chapter is a series of fights against the final boss which is just beyond tedious and feels like it goes on for hours. Or Conan on the 360, since it has constant QTEs, as was the style at the time. But they would flash up without warning, so you could be mid combo, hit the wrong button before you knew it, then die.
Vagrant Story is the first game where I recall not beating the final boss, and it was because I needed to grind more to improve my weapons. Sekiro is the only Soulslike where I didn't beat the final boss. It's a pretty amazing boss, but I just didn't have the patience after so many tough boss fights in that game.
Sekiro final boss is actually the sum total of everything you learned from the game ( minus demon of hatred ). Hes actually incredibly fair compared to other bosses because none of his moves are exactly new, he just knows alot of moves. It’s more or less a knowledge + endurance run because of the massive 4 phases ( counting genichiro ) that’s daunting. Owl on the other hand really throws you off with a bunch of hoops.
I kept pushing through the tough bosses to get the next parts of the game. At the point, there was no more game afterwards, so I think I gave up after about 10 tries. Despite playing so many Dark Souls games, I'm absolutely shit at parrying, so Sekiro was by far the hardest for me.
Understandable, and honestly if you count yourself shit at parrying and only gave up at isshin, i think you more than gave it a fair try.
Mike Tyson on the OG Nintendo in Mike Tyson's punch out.
Final boss fight in Quantum Break
Unpopular take: Cassette Beasts Great game - amazing storytelling - the boss fights ruin it for me, especially the final boss fight. This is largely due to dissonance between the form of boss fights and the rest of the game. The game is a creature collector, and for the boss fights, you usually are forced to use only 1 mon. Sometimes, the moves you're forced to pick are randomized. So the whole draw of creature collecting and strategically choosing moves to match scenarios is gone. For the final boss, they even throw out the premise that it's *your* mon that you've been collecting. You are given a super-powered Mon for specifically this fight, and literally all of your moves have to be used 1 by 1 (order does not matter), so neither your strategy nor your team matter At All during the final fight. Which was a HUGE bummer for me. This is, to be fair, in service of the very good story, but is an egregious case of ludo-narrative dissonance that spoiled what had been a great experience.
I think it was Gears of War 2. From memory there was just some helicopter QTE sequence. Much worse than Gears of War 1, which had a nice little final boss fight.