I like a Kirk solution to a Kobayashi Maru situation as much as the next guy, but I’m with fuzzydevil on this one: any boss fight where you can’t easily figure out on your own what you’re supposed to do is an insta-fail for me.
Note I said “easy to figure out,” not “easy to accomplish.” I don’t mind a decent challenge; reading the goddamn designers’ minds, however, is not a decent challenge.
Not a boss fight per se - which may be why I like it - but I thought the end to HL2E2 was pretty cool.
I was terrible at that centipede boss in the SNES Zelda. The one who, if you get tapped, sends you FLYING INTO THE ABYSS which makes you fall several floors. Have to fight your way back up again, only to be shoved back down, back up, back down, etc. I hated him so much.
Now the jumping statues of death…that was a fun fight.
Gun: Competent, not-very-challenging western action comes to a screeching halt right at the end. The Big Bad General, wielding a machine gun and dynamite, is impervious to bullets and can only be killed by igniting gas emitted by craters as he walks past them. A hint would’ve been nice.
Kingpin: You face off against both the Kingpin and his female bodyguard. The game’s final scene shows the bodyguard escaping by helicopter. Therefore, she is utterly unkillable. Nobody tells you about this.
The most annoying thing about Nihilanth was the green balls that it shot would teleport you to a pocket of jump puzzle hell.
Fortunately, you had these HUGE barriers to hide behind, effectively making those (and all of Nihilanth’s other attacks) completely ineffective.
The only pain comes when dealing with whatever aliens teleport into the chamber. Those vortigaunts and flying head creatures are a pain in the ass.
Old and rare: Alundra.
Just about every boss in Alundra was hugely complex and took forever. I understand they even dumbed them down and shortened them all for the U.S. release!
Great game except for those looooooooooooong battles.
Lionheart, again. After you’ve played through this mindlessly tedious RPG (on the basis of a promising first chapter) you finally get to the world’s worst boss fight.
Stupid tedious fight with a stupid trick you have to look up (click this insignificant pixel during the course of the fight, or else you can never win), during the course of which you have to protect two stupid NPCs who insult you continuously. Of course if you let either one die, it’s game over.
Then when the sack-of-hit-points boss is finally beaten, he teleports 3000 miles back to your home town, corrupts its rulers and its church, and takes over. And that’s it for the game, credits roll, no other optional “good” ending. At the moment this cut scene plays, I imagine the 3 or 4 people who actually finished Lionheart would have happily killed the entire dev team if only there had been a pop-up option for it in the credits screen.
I kind of like the boss fights at the end of Atlus games like Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne or the Digital Devil Saga games. The bosses are visually pretty, have a bunch of interesting powers, and there is some system by which you can defeat them with your own now-uber powers. It feels satisfying to kick their asses, basically.
I wanted to list Lionheart but, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what made the final battle any worse than everything that had come before it. Thanks for the reminder.
Finishing Lionheart was such an enervating experience that I couldn’t even get up to sharpen my axe.
Recent: Lou from GH3. Fuck him.
Old school: Minax from Ultima 2. As you approached her, you would randomly be moved in different directions. After you finally hit her once, she’d teleport somewhere else. And by somewhere else, I don’t mean 2 screens away. I mean on the 8th level of a dungeon on another continent in another time. Track her down, repeat. Never did finish that game.
The boss at the end of MDK2 was awful. The worst was that you could pick one of three characters to play against it, and each iteration sucked. That makes it triple-terrible. I blame Charles.
The Tartarus fight in Halo 2 felt a bit too much like metagaming to me. The only really effective approach I could find was to exploit his pathing to make him revert to his default ‘waiting’ spot whenever he started chasing me.
As much as I loved Undying, the last boss (seemingly inspired by Lovecraft) was a huge pain for me. I actually had to read a FAQ to make sure I was doing it right and that there wasn’t a trick to him. I basically was doing the attacks right, it just took a zillion bullets to kill him. I quite literally unloaded all of my guns and I came in with full ammo. That is poor end boss design because there was no way to tell if I was really hurting him or how hurt he was.
I would like to submit for your review - Ninja Gaiden.
Seriously. At its core, a great game, totally and irrevocably destroyed by horrid boss battles.
Dr. Wily final boss fight from Mega Man 2 still pisses me off.
I wouldn’t say it was destroyed by the boss battles, but the boss battles definitely didn’t make the game better. In fact, I agree they made the game worse. The rest of the game would have been much better without them, but I guess I’ve come to expect horrid boss battles from Japanese games. I know that’s not an excuse, it’s just the reason that I tolerate them so much and don’t let them ruin the enjoyment of the rest of the game.
I personally thought Halo 2 had some of the worst boss battles for me. I think it might have had to do with the fact that it was a North American developer, and not just that, it was a first person shooter. What the hell are boss battles doing in this game in the first place? Why do I need to hit this guy a billion times to kill him? I thought Halo 2 was already inferior to the other two games in the series in many ways, but the boss battles really made the Coop legendary campaign a frustrating experience rather than a fun one.
Totally and irrevocably damaged by its platforming bits, perhaps. But the boss fights? I’d say Alma was one of the best worst experiences in a game, period, not something you can lump in with the generic or broken garbage in this thread. The biggest complaint I had was the unevenness in the difficulties between bosses and levels, and Black did much to address that. Well, that and the last boss just seemed to be phoning it in. But at least it was relatively easy.
I had no idea so many people here had played Lionheart.
There was a third Max Payne game? Set in some sort of Croatian neighborhood in Queens? What?
The final encounter in Bioshock was uninteresting and lame. Throughout the whole game Atlas is built up as a fairly interesting character and then he becomes a cartoonish super-villain.