One game that’s recently received a lot of flack about poorly designed boss battles is Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While I commend the dudes at Eidos for trying to give the game that old school flavor, I think most people would prefer to have no boss fights at all over lame bosses.
As bad as a repetitive or boring enemy is, he is at his most heinous when he is cheap, or virtually unbeatable. I think we’ve all seen our fair share of these. In case you haven’t, or you need your memory refreshed, Dorkly has put together a list of the 7 cheapest boss fights in all of gaming.
I can’t say I’ve actually dealt with all of these antagonists first hand, but I know that Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts was one ridiculous mofo, dishing out death with a flash of his blade and that iconic silver hair. Also, I remember Death Egg being a total bastard in Sonic 2.
Were any of these familiar to you guys? Were there any cheap bosses that you think should have been on the list? What are some of the best boss encounters you can remember in recent years?
Source – Dorkly
Heads up, the boss battles in Deus Ex were outsourced to a company called G.R.I.P. If you watch the behind the scenes, G.R.I.P is actually super happy with the way they made the boss fights. But yeah, the boss fights in Deus Ex were the hardest I’ve ever faced, other than the time when my friend invited me over to play Kingdom Hearts and started at the Sephiroth battle.
Frankly I found the Death Egg and Shao Kahn to be ridiculously easy once you know how to beat them, so they definately didn’t belong on the list. Also I found Gill from Street Fighter 3 to be much more difficult than M. Bison ever was.
I’ve always been kind of the opposite from what this post is saying, in that I usually like the more poorly designed bosses better than no bosses. One thing that comes to mind is games like Doom where you had the Spider Mastermind, where the entire goal of it was to kill him before he kills you with his super chaingun that shoots 3 bullets at a time. There’s no real hope of dodging his bullets, you just have to hope that their randomizer makes them miss. I still have a lot of fun with boss battles like that though, probably because I’m insane.
A boss battle (if you can call it that) that I absolutely hated, however, is the final battle from the original Deus Ex. Not to spoil anything, but let’s just say that it involves a lot of the most annoying enemies in the game constantly respawning and deactivating their respawners is kind of a hassle (and I didn’t even know that it was possible my first run through the game).
I also really didn’t like the giant spider in Dark Messiah of Might And Magic, but that was an optional boss if I remember correctly, so I can’t really complain much about that.
So i was surfing pcgamer.com and i stumbled onto this:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/19/deus-ex-human-revolution-boss-fights-were-outsourced/
Just thought i would share this because for me, this clarifies why the boss fights seemed so out of place.
Best boss in recent memory? It might be Escape From Butcher Bay. Was not the best, but it was chaotic, tough and i loved every second of it.
^ The last boss fight. Forgot to put that in there.
Seems like you could do an almost endless list of cheap JRPG bosses.
The worst one I remember wasn’t actually the boss, but what took place afterward. In the original Sega CD version of Lunar: Silver Star, you had to ascend a long staircase to reach Luna (who was possessed by an evil goddess…or something). When you got halfway up the steps, she fires a lightning bolt at you that will kill you with one hit. The stairway is two squares wide, so there’s clearly a pattern that would allow you to avoid being hit, but there’s absolutely no way of knowing this pattern before you ascend the stairs and the lightning bolts cannot be dodged if you’re not on the right square.
And what happens after the one shot kill? You have to go back and fight the final boss…again. The PS1 remake fixed this problem by letting you save after you defeat the boss, but I played through the entire game in abject terror of reaching that point again.
Actually, the cheapest boss I ever encountered was the Predator in the old Commodore 64 version of the Predator video game. I’m 99% sure that the final boss was actually broken, however, so I’m not sure if this counts.
First of all, the flame thrower was the only weapon that would hurt him without provoking an instant kill shot from his shoulder cannon (because, you know, we all loved that scene in the movie where Schwarzenegger turned the flame thrower on the Predator and…wait, what do you mean there were no flame throwers in that movie?). Second, when you finally reached the final confrontation (with the flame thrower, of course), the Predator’s self destruct sequence shows up on the top of the screen and you see a log dangling from a rope (which at least was actually in the movie) on the far end of the screen.
Um…so what happens now? I have no idea. The countdown on the destruct sequence never actually counts down, there’s no way to shoot the rope to drop the log on the Predator (well, to be fair, perhaps you could do it with regular gun, but you would never know that because you wouldn’t have been able to get this far without using the damned flame thrower), and the Predator just keeps walking towards you until you shoot him to drive him off for like five seconds. The scene simply repeats itself until you finally run out of ammo and the Predator stabs you, then rips out your spine to taunt you.
God, I wish I could have those precious hours of my childhood back…
Anima wasn’t too hard. Summoning Shiva and spamming blizzard on both Anima or herself (to heal her) and using her overdrive Diamond Dust is almost guaranteed to take about 1/2 – 3/4 of Anima’s health off. Then it’s just a case of fielding Yuna/Lulu/Auron as Auron is an almost guaranteed survivor of Pain, Lulu has Blizzard/Blizzara and Yuna can cast Shell and various other White Mage spells. Then Seymour is relatively easy to finish off. Evrae the Guardian Wyrm was MUCH harder. Stupid fucking Poison Breath/Swooping Scythe. Evrae Altana was piss easy though. 1st turn, Phoenix Down: Boom. Job done.
As for BEST boss encounters in recent years? MGS4 had some highlights. The Laughing Octopus one was particularly good. As was (and I believe I’m alone in thinking this) the final fight against Liquid Ocelot despite the fact that the fighting controls weren’t fantastic. It was a nice homage to the series as a whole and the end where Snake and Ocelot are knackered and can barely go on is quite poignant. The boss fight against the Dragon in the Sky Temple in Twilight Princess was very enjoyable as was the fight against Zant. Just thinking about those make me want to play Skyward Sword!
The last three boss fights in Bayonetta are wicked cheap, too (Jeanne, Father Balder, and Jubileus).
Oh, and let’s not forget Ares in the first God of War. That guy was WAY overpowered.
Ultimicia from Final Fantasy VIII was borderline impossible to beat if you didn’t have Squall’s legendary weapon and the proper Guardian Force ability loadout (namely the game-breaking Revive and Restore abilities). She just has SO many hit points; if you don’t use the Lionheart’s limit break attack, you could pummel her all day with Holy and Meteor spells and not come close to bringing her down.