This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Zarian: I really don't think it's a good idea to cut examples simply because they're not quite as bad as a particular game's worst, especially when this is a Subjective Trope. And its subjectivity can lead the editor to choose to keep the example that seemed the worst to them, as opposed to the one most people agree is the worst. Case in point: in Baten Kaitos Origins' section, three bosses were listed. The fandom generally agrees on two as the worst bosses in the game; the one now listed is neither of those two. I'd revert it, but I really don't want to start an Edit War without at least getting a second opinion first.
Wild Knight: I just posted something very similar to this on the main That One Boss Discussion and put the Baten Kaitos bosses back...without actually reading this first. Great minds think alike? >.> Consider this your second opinion, then. It'd be nice to have an official word on this, though.
Great Limmick: Someone mentioned Brock from Pokemon Yellow (or Blue/Red if you started with Charmander). In Yellow, he's much easier if you catch a couple of Nidoran and teach them Double Kick (a Fighting-type move). I've forgotten whether Nidoran learn Double Kick early enough in Red/Blue to be of any use.
Cubia888: My strategy involved using Pidgey's sand-attack to lower the accuracy of Brock's Pokemon. I also used tail whip. Even though the attacks aren't effective type-wise, lowering the defense makes up for it.
- The final boss, Lord Bane, also qualifies - especially if you've relied on spells instead of Battle power. Since his spell resistances are decent to begin with and only get stronger over time, it's nearly impossible to use the good combos.
- This troper disputes that- while Bane is certainly hard, he has several weaknesses that can be exploited. He has no damage spells, meaning you can keep him under control by playing conservatively and keeping an eye on the skulls on the board. And while the spells he does have can shake up the board seriously, the AI is not particularly bright and will often use it in situations which don't produce a 4-of-a-kind- meaning that you then get the first turn on a functionally fresh board, and can commonly score multiple 4-of-a-kinds and a skull hit or two before he goes again. In a sense Bane is an ideal climactic boss, in that beating him requires you be skilled at the game rather then have an arsenal of cheap tricks and combos at your disposal. Although I won't deny that sneaking an occasional Thump! or Stun through doesn't hurt...
—-
32_Footsteps Removing this:
- How has no one mentioned Wiegraf/Belias from Final Fantasy Tactics in Chapter 3? For any player who doesn't have Ramza properly levelled up, it's nearly impossible to get through the first half one-on-one battle, much less the second half where Belias comes to play. To top it all off, if you didn't make a backup save file, it was virtually impossible to continue or exit, and has caused many players despair in being forced to restart the game from the beginning when they realize they're stuck.
... because Final Fantasy Tactics is a strategy game. Consequently, said boss fight is mentioned on That One Boss Strategy Examples.
Tanto: Anyone who has trouble with Regal officially Fails At Life. I mean, c'mon, guy has like ten hit points.
For that matter, most of the Symphonia bosses are misplaced here. If you're having trouble with every single fight, maybe it's you? I'll give you Kratos and maybe Kvar (but only on Hard Mode or better), but the rest? I repeat: C'mon.
Eponymous Kid: Magnius, too, come on. And Botta and Yuan together, for that matter. Maybe Volt. The others are probably... I put that stuff there, and it was a stretch.
Kvar was actually pretty easy for me, I didn't have any trouble with him. Pronyma was actually not that bad either; I probably just wasn't redy for her the first time (since they spring that one up on you). I didn't know I was the only one who had trouble with Regal, though... I must've been underleveled, or something.
- Shadow Hearts averts this, due to the inherent low (or lack of) difficulty of all three games.
- You've obviously never tried to get the Seraphic Radiance fusion in the first game.
- Or fought Solomon in the second one.
- This troper did both of those quests. Not hard in the slightest. This troper loves the series to death, but still thinks the games are piss-easy. Then again, nothing can be as Nintendo Hard as a Megaten game.
Man Called True: Discussing a boss's relative difficulty: good. Mocking an entire series for its difficulty: not so good. Using as inflammatory a term as "piss-easy": grounds for removal.
Cybele: Sorry about that. Been too spoiled by the (really) high difficulties of games like Megaten and God Hand. Everything else just seems less challenging after playing those for extended periods of time.
Man Called True: Personally, I found Covenant rather easy, but that was because I ran through it on a "no running" Self-Imposed Challenge. When Yuri is Level 66 and you can both get and instantly max-level the Dark Seraphim without sweating, everything is a cinch...
Twe Twe: I never found Baldur's Gate II's Draconis to be hard!! True Sight, keep your mages out of the battle, either set up auto-pause or watch your people's hit points like a hawk. Dead Draconis. SENDAI, on the other hand, handed my arse to me over and over and OVER on my first couple of playthroughs... just down to party balance and play style, I'm sure.
sci:
FF9 ? First of all, if one gets exp/ability-up asap, the entire game will get easier and easier (Actually, these two abilities are possibly a
Game-Breaker). As for the individual bosses:
- Ark: Really pathetic, only noteworthy attack can (but only can) confuse your entire party. At best, that makes him a Wake-Up Call Boss to equip something to protect against that.
- Gizamaluke can be outhealed by one single character using potions all over (of course, you should have all characters in the back row, which by the way also helps against ark and many others), so I honestly can't understand why he is listed here ...
- Earth Guardian: The game tells you, which sort of element you are going to face, so you can easily optimize your equipment for that ... well, he is not that much of a challange if you absorb his strongest attack ...
- Tiamat: Is encountered so late that you party should be really well advanced thanks to +50% exp for more than half the game, that just wiping the floor with anything short of Ozma should really be easy. Personally, I never even have seen snort, heat is maybe THE thing to have protection equiped against it (if the mooks in a certain volcano didn't teach that several hours earlier, the boss right before this one might), and those aoe attack can easily healed with a little aoe heal. If that fails, he has 60000 hp, and at that point, that shouldn't take that long to just blast away.
While this trope is subjective, in my opinion, those are at best
Wake Up Call Bosses, maybe mixed with
Puzzle Boss. So, do those really belong here ?
jtmmachine: I'm a bit late to respond, but ANY boss becomes easier when you have a 50% increase in experience and Ability Points. It's sort of a Game-Breaker, so judging bosses based from using an experience booster won't make an accurate result. And, like you said, it's a subjective trope. Different people have different general strategies, and bosses can become easier or harder based on them. Being the person who added Tiamat, I'll admit that I wrote that after my first time battling him, where he wiped the floor with me, but he still has a lot of attacks and status effects to take into account.
Bok: I'm not sure about those
FF 4 DS mentions. Cagnazzo seems mentioned only because of the (baseless) assumption that you need to cast Thundaga on him to cancel the tsunami, when really a regular Thunder (6 times faster, just make sure you have Tellah ready for it) or thunder-claw attack from Yang will do. The Magus Sisters were strangely easy to me even ignoring the nicely natter'd puzzle boss comment; in fact, after taking out Rag they don't even have any way to attack anymore, so even if you randomly kill one of them off there's a 2/3rd chance you'll either kill their way to regenerate or their only source of damage output. Lugae is also a puzzle boss; once he casts Reverse Gas using a single Elixir on him will kill him off instantly. (instead of recovering max HP, he takes max HP damage; strangely, Phoenix Downs do nothing)
Egh. Nevermind. "However, any easy tactics like Revive Kills Zombie disqualify a boss from being That One Boss." which automatically disqualifies Lugae. I'm guessing Cagnazzo and the Magus sisters as well.
The following I'm not so sure about. Chest monsters are optimal, and complaining about the game being hard has nothing to do with the trope either.
- The DS remake is the hardest version of FFIV this troper has ever played. While not technically bosses, the various chest-guarding dragons in the final dungeon on the Moon are freaking tough. A lot of random encounters can kill your party in one or two hits. FFIV DS is That One Game.
- These fights seem to be the developers way of mocking players for believing the Standard Status Ailments are all qualify as a Useless Useful Spell - most of them simply require clever use of something like Slow, Berserk, or Poison.
Yggi Dee: Persona 3 had a Gainax Ending? ...The whole thing fit to me.
Wild Knight: ? Why were Giacomo, Folon, and Ayme from Baten Kaitos removed? Not only is each one ridiculously powerful on their own, but both encounters with them involve circumstances specifically designed to screw the player over (first one traps you outside the level-up church, second one has two battles with them in a row with no chance to heal in between). If there's a strategy I missed...then for god's sake let me know I've been stuck on them for five years oh god why. >.>
Caswin: "Trim Trim Trim. Remember that there's a different section for SRP Gs". A different section for what now?
Raven Black: Seconded, with an added cry of "No there isn't!" and especially in regards to the Pokemon-related deletions. Seriously, I know I'm not the only one who shudders at the mention of Bronzong.
Shrikesnest: I'm doing some cleanup, but I'll be nice about it and give reasons for why I took out most of what I took out. If you disagree, feel free to add it back in, but please give us a reason why it fits the trope.
Removed the following:
open/close all folders
Final Fantasy Cuts
- Final Fantasy I had, at the end of the Marsh Cave, a squad of wizards protecting the next Plot Coupon you needed. They were much more powerful than anything else at that point in the game, and they had absolutely no elemental weaknesses. The closest they had was that they didn't resist lightning damage, so your best bet was to hope that you'd only randomly encounter two or three (instead of five) and that the Random Number Generator hit the higher end of the scale when it came time to calculate damage on them.
That's a Wakeup Call Boss; there are others that are just as hard in the later game.
- Actually, apparently if your party only includes a single dragoon (because everyone else is fucking dead) then Garuda becomes much weaker. Sort of a twisted Revive Kills Zombie.
We need a video-game specific trope similar to Thread Mode called Walkthrough Mode
- By far the worst is the end of the game, where some genius at square decied that a long and boring dungeon, follow by SIX bosses, long unskippable cutscenes AND NO SAVE POINTS was a good idea. No, no it wasn't.
This isn't even a boss fight, it's just a really hard final dungeon. Doesn't fit.
- To be (slightly) fair, if you're anywhere near strong enough to even hope to beat the final boss the Cloud of Darkness, Xande, the first of the encounters in the Boss Rush, will be ridiculously easy and you'll have several party members who can hit him for more than 9,999. (He only has 50,000 HP)
To be fair, this isn't even close to an example of this trope. Quite the opposite, in fact.
- In the DS version all the bosses are harder to some extent, but Calcabrina is now nightmarishly difficult and counters every single attack made by your characters with an attack that causes well over a thousand points of damage, probably enough to result in an instant kill at that stage of the game.
Golbez is objectively harder, and he's literally five minutes away from this boss.
- How come no one has mentioned Emerald Weapon yet? Unless you have lucky 7's and Knight of the Round, this bad Mother from the ocean will rip you to shreds!
He's a Bonus Boss; you never have to fight him.
- Final Fantasy VIII has X-ATM092, which has an unusually high HP totals for the segments of the game he's featured in AND is fought under a strict time limit. X-ATM092 also heals itself and utilizes the annoying Ray Bomb attack, which fries your allies if your defense isn't up to snuff.
The game explicitly tells you to run from him. Like, constantly. Beating him is an optional achievement for the bored or hardcore, not a requirement. Optional bosses don't fit. QED.
- Also, the Evrae fight on the airship. Made difficult by the fiddly dragon-is-close-to-airship/dragon-is-far-from-airship mechanic that affected how you could fight the critter, the dragon Hasting itself and Slowing you, the dragon hitting hard, and you being without a healer or summoner for this whole disaster.
Hard? Yes. Yunalesca hard? Hell. No.
- In Final Fantasy X-2, the Angra Mainyu boss. It's technically optional, but certainly doesn't seem that way at the time - the quest plays out over multiple chapters with no indication that it's going to lead to combat at all, and then the instant you complete the subquest, you're yanked straight into the fight. The damn thing has over 300,000 Hit Points, two "arms" that must be destroyed separately (but gets revived over and over), and a massively damaging suite of attacks. The worst part is that you must fight it for 100% Completion. The Cat Nip accessory kinda helps.
Optional, so in the bin it goes.
- Actually, there's a very easy way to beat Angra Mainyu. The trick is, all of his abilities are spells, save one, which he can't use unless Zarich and Tawrich (his arms) are alive. Use Soul Springs to drop Angra Mainyu's MP to Zero, then use Magicide (an ability of the Samurai Class, which can't be permanently missed under any circumstances) on yourself to drop your own MP to Zero, then kill the arms (they have roughly 5K HP, easy pickings at that point.) If your party and Angra Mainyu all have 0 MP and the arms are dead, you can just sit back and wail on him until he eventually keels over.... which could admittadly take a long, long time.
Walkthrough Mode, so in the bin it goes.
- Even if you ignore many of the challenging side-quest bosses, Final Fantasy XI featured several examples, especially in the Chains of Promathia storyline. Mammet-19-Epsilon, Ix'zdei, Snoll Tzar, Ouryu, Ultima and Omega, any of the Promyvion bosses, just take your pick. Many of these bosses could be weakened using certain quested items, but some of these (like the CCB Polymer Pump) can venture into being That One Sidequest. Treasures of Aht Urhgan is more merciful, but still has Gessho and the final boss to keep people awake at night.
- Absolute Virtue. Long story short: He has never been killed the way the developers foresaw the fight going. All instances of him dying have been due to exploits or other strategies later patched out of existence.
- Square-Enix may have topped themselves with their newest boss: Pandemonium Warden
who was still going even after 18 hours of fighting. The bad press resulting from this caused Square to impose a two-hour limit on Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden, after which they disappear and you have to go through the process of popping them all over again. Pandemonium Warden was eventually defeated by Apathy of Remora, via zombying with blue mages and logging out to clear hate to avoid Astral Flow. Players new to the genre who never played Ever Quest call it "ur doin it rong" while old veterans of online RP Gs just accept it at face value. Absolute Virtue, on the other hand, has still never been beaten without the use of exploits.
It's a mess, so I cut it. Anybody who knows FFXI and wants to take a stab at cleaning that up can feel free to, but there's like a dozen bosses listed there.
- Three (four?) words: ???: The Hunt Begins. Hey, it's Sochen Cave Palace! Looks pretty simple, just a bunch of zombies an-what the heck? Five little Mandragora-like things? Can't be that bad...yeah, right.
What the devil game is this from? This example is meaningless to anyone who hasn't played the (unlisted) game.
- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles has that one final boss, Raem! How the hell were we supposed to know to cast Cure on your PC's memories? And while we're at it, with each passing year, the bosses at every myrrh tree spot grow tougher, and tougher, and tougher. The Zombie Dragon boss at Conall Curach should be named the Scrappy Boss of all time.
- Although the bosses that you can fight over and over only grow stronger to a certain point (they grow stronger at least 2-3 times and then they stop getting stronger).
Final boss, so it doesn't count.
Okay, so that's the Final Fantasy section. Cleanup is ongoing.
Pokemon Cuts
- Almost all of the legendary Pokémon from the Pokemon series are frustratingly hard to capture. This is justified because they're the games' Infinity Plus One Monsters once they're under your control, but this just means that your Pokemon will have a tough time weathering out their powerful attacks while you carefully weaken them enough to have any chance at all of catching them by throwing Ultra Ball after Ultra Ball at them.
- The second generation Pokemon games feature legendaries a step above the others in terms of frustration. Instead of sticking to one dungeon like the first games' Legendaries, they wander around the world, forcing you to chase them down and prevent them from immediately running away. In fact, most players keep their Master Ball to catch them, when they have the luck of finding them. Too bad you only get one Master Ball - did we mention there are three of these running Legendaries?
- Even more damningly, Arena Trap doesn't work on any of the wandering legendaries after the three in G/S/C (the rest have Levitate as their ability) and Shadow Tag is only found on Wynaut and Wobbuffet, two Pokémon utterly incapable of dealing damage on their own whose only methods of attack is to double the damage they've received — a practically surefire method to render them Lost Forever without Save Scumming.
- Mewtwo in the original games was easily That One Boss in those games. Psychic pokemon were broken already, but Mewtwo had insane stats, a high level, and the powerful attack Psychic. Also, not only were Ultra Balls unable to keep Mewtwo in; often times, Mewtwo would DODGE THE ULTRA BALL, effectively pissing off every single gamer who hadn't saved the Master Ball for him.
- And FINALLY, he knows Recover, meaning you must continuously reduce his health, or put him to sleep and pray he doesn't wake up. This troper only managed to catch him when he was frozen due to a lucky ice beam.
This is going to be a controversial move on my part, since these guys are definitely the biggest challenge in the game, but... these fights are all optional, so they don't count. If I'm wrong, feel free to add these back in, but it seems to me that they don't fit the trope.
- Though Sabrina isn't so bad once you realize that you can skip her until after defeating Blaine. This does make Koga a bit harder, but considering that you'll probably have a fresh Hitmonlee/Hitmonchan from the Saffron's fighting gym, his poison types aren't much of a threat for the experienced player.
- This Troper recalls Sabrina being a chump to Fly and Dig. But this was in the older games where everyone was basically nerfed.
Walkthrough Mode
- In the Yellow version, Lt. Surge hovers between Wake-Up Call Boss to those who played Red and Blue and That One Boss. So what if he's got a Raichu, that's why I have a Diglett...LEVEL 28!? No matter, I'm still immune to elec—*MEGA KICK, dead Diglett* Uh oh.
- It's even worse in Stadium, where that same Raichu knows how to Surf.
Wake-Up Call Boss all over the place. And he's still way easier than Misty in the early generations.
- At least those guys/gals were always in their gyms, where you wouldn't be horribly surprised to see them. Quite unlike GARY MOTHERFUCKING OAK. Nearly every encounter with him is quite a nasty shock:
- Want to train your first Pokemon on Route 22? Better not go to far towards the Pokemon League, lest you run into him and his two Pokemon, which, if you haven't trained a bit, will own you but hard. Technically, he is not necessary to fight here, unless you want to decide what his Eevee evolves into in yellow.
- Want to go visit Bill's cottage? Uh oh, look who's back, with some new friends who want to say hello.
- Want to get off the S.S. Anne and fight Surge already? Too bad, cause Gary's looking to test out his newly evolved starter and Kadabra.
- Want to get through Pokemon Tower as fast as possible? How unfortunate, because Gary wants to see how strong you've gotten!
- Want to get to Giovanni at the top of Silph Co? Well, tough luck, since he's waiting along the only warp tile path to the main office to use his now fully evolved starter and a lot of other nasties. Especially frustrating because, depending on how fast you went up Pokemon Tower and Silph Co, you could've just fought him about half an hour ago with his Pokemon at much lower levels.
- Want to get through to the Pokemon League on Route 22? Well, that's fine... but you'll have to fight Mr. Oak again. Well, at least that's the last time you'll see him again... oh, wait...
- Want to become Pokemon Champion after fighting the Elite Four? Well, your Rival has something to say about that. With high level Pokemon, that is.
- Even in Gold, Silver and Crystal you can't escape him...when you travel back to Kanto he's the final gym leader!
- Green, obviously, appears again in the remakes named Heart Gold and Soul Silver, the sequels to the remakes of Red and Green called Firered and Leafgreen. No problem, right? He just has level 50 - 60 Pokemon..At least he has a cool new look◊, and is more mature then he was eleven.
Super-Ultra Clutter. And he's demonstrably easier than Sabrina unless he's the Final Boss, in which case he doesn't count.
- The Elite Four plus the Champion is just about every Pokemon game. Not only are they much stronger than even the last bosses, you have to have five battles in a row without the aid of a Pokemon Center. This can be helped with Level Grinding, Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, and lots of Revives and Hyper Potions, but still...
- Steven was a dick for going out of his way to have Pokemon with dual Steel/X types, the X type usually canceling out the Steel side's weakness's, and his Pokemon knew moves designed to counter the types he was weak to. Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors isn't so fun when it's turned back on you. Steven's Metagross alone is a That One Boss. It has incredible offensive and defensive stats, good speed as well, and it knows extremely powerful attacks. And it's Steel/Psychic, which is an unbelievably unfair type combo (see Lucian's Bronzong below for a second example). Steel blocks Normal-type attacks AND negates all of Psychic's weaknesses, so let's look at the Steel type for a weakness. Fighting? Nope, his Psychic attack beats that. Ground? Most Ground-types have bad special defense, so Psychic whomps them too. So Fire then! Wait... he knows Earthquake, which is extremely powerful and super-effective. Really, how are you supposed to beat this guy in a one-on-one fight? You almost have to use two (or three!) 'mons to beat this one cheap sonofagun.
- The queen of abuse of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors would be Cynthia, the Champion in Diamond/Pearl. She starts off the match with Spiritomb, one of only two Pokemon with no weaknesses (and has great stats in both defenses to boot) and is a Guide Dang It! to acquire. She just progresses from there.
- To drive home how bad Cynthia's Spiritomb is, take a look at serebii.net and see how many Pokemon can learn Fighting moves (which Dark type is weak against) and Foresight (which cancels the Ghost-type immunity to Fighting moves). And Shadow Pokemon cannot be imported from the Game Cube games, or players would likely pull one through Pal Park just for her. Need I say more? Oh yeah... it has max IVs on top of that like the rest of her team.
- Pfft, Spiritomb's one of her easy ones. Garchomp and Lucario, on the other hand...
- Don't forget her Milotic, which has an ungodly high Special Defense. You're almost glad when Roserade and Gastrodon show up.
- Oh, and in Platinum, she loses that Gastrodon for a much superior Togekiss. So Yeah.
- I just went, "Screw this!" and let her beat me, thus finishing my visual Pokedex. I then had access to Pal Park. Cue me sending over my Level 100's and nuking her team. It should NOT require one Pal Parking LEVEL 100'S TO BEAT THE CHAMPION!
- Lucian's Bronzong. Steel/Psychic type, referenced above as being a truly unfair combination. Bronzongs have two possible Abilities, Levitate and Fireproof, either of which negates one of the Pokemon's only two weaknesses (ground and fire, respectively). Lucian's uses Levitate and has great defense stats on top of that, so unless you're packing a high-level fire-type, you're going to go down hard. Then, just when you think you've whittled it down enough that you can put it away the next round, Lucian busts out a full restore and you're back at square one. ARGH!
- Red. Granted, he was supposed to be the strongest trainer in the game, but that goddamn Snorlax could easily kill any momentum you had built up and singlehandedly shut your team down.
- His Pikachu in HGSS in is un-godly, being the strongest ingame Pokemon of any Pokemon game, at level 88. Plus, he knows Volt Tackle and is holding a Light Ball. Not to forget he has all three of the original starters in their final form, a Snorlax and a Lapras.
- Sorry, but Lance takes the title of Cheating Bastard. He LITERALLY cheats. In RBY, his Pokemon know moves that they should not know. In GSC, his Dragonairs and Dragonite essentially DELEVELLED WITH THE DRAGONAIRS EVOLVING. God, I had such troubles against him as a kid >.<
Final Boss
- Greevil, the Final Boss of Pokemon XD, is an absolute nightmare in that regard. His ENTIRE TEAM consists of Shadow Pokemon, and half of them are legendaries. Eldes is pretty bad too considering he has four Shadow Pokemon in his six-Pokemon team, but nothing really compares to Greevil.
- Greevil is easier when you remember two things: First, he has 7 pokemon. Normally this would be a bad thing, but you can only have six pokemon in your party, and the AI is no exception; as a result, he always throws out XD-001, AKA Shadow Lugia, solo first. Just have an open slot in your party and chuck your Master Ball. Second is the fact that Shadow Pokemon are resistant to Shadow-type moves, which are only used by Shadow Pokemon; just put that Shadow Lugia you caught on the field, and chip away at Greevil's team's health and Snag them as you go. Make sure you have tons of Max Potions, Full Heals, and Full Restores before you do this, however...
- One problem that many people run into when dealing with the Shadow Pokemon users in XD is that they try to snag them in that first fight. More often, it makes much more sense to just take them all out - it's much easier than trying to keep them alive (and having to sacrifice one of your Pokemon's moves to throw a ball to catch them), plus any you defeat will become the property of Miror B, who will have a much weaker team (plus really awesome theme music) backing them up, so that you have to deal with catching just one Shadow Pokemon with backup 10-30 levels weaker than it instead of multiple Shadow Pokemon with backup of comparable level.
More Final Boss plus Walkthrough Mode
Whew! Looking over this, I may have been a little cut-happy. Feel free to put some of this back in if you're familiar with the games and willing to clean some of it up.
Others
- In Baldur's Gate, this troper remembers encountering 2 ordinary looking skeletons referred to as skeleton warriors or something. Even after tricking one into going into setting off a ton of traps in dying, then falling back and saving, this troper had his entire party wiped out repeatedly by that one skeleton, as the party seemed utterly incapable of hitting it. The final boss fight almost immediately after featured a group of enemies who were quite hittable and vulnerable to all the specialized equipment and ammo the party had by then.
- The skeleton archers in question are:
- Immune to magic, so you can't just toss fireballs at them
- Behind a pair of high-powered traps, so you can't send your melee fighters charging in
- Archers, so they can take out your thief as he tries to disable the traps
- Immune to the traps, so you can't lure them to their destruction
- Use fire arrows, so they can kill your archers faster than you can kill them** Baldur's Gate II at least had the decency to give the Skeleton Warriors an appropriately badass new model. They eventually were hopelessly outmatched by your increasingly powerful party, but still a great pain in the early stages of the game (when you were considerably stronger than in the first Baldur's Gate).
Demonic Spiders
Bonus Boss
- In Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song, the Bonus Boss, Jewel Beast, is immensely powerful. It will Launch its Special Attack, Jewel Blaster, on the second turn in battle and every 5-6 turns afterwards, when you whittle it's HP down it will fire every Jewel Blaster 3 turns. It is immune to magic and has great physical strength. It is possible to defeat it but it requires that you heavily temper your magical and physical defense which requires large amounts of money to get. The Easier way is to use the Game-Breaker magic: Overdrive (5 attacks in one turn)
Bonus Boss
- Berserker is notorious for his difficulty how ever if you pay attention to what is said before battle he also becomes a case of Revive Kills Zombie. Nighto, a seemingly useless, trivial enemy/capturable earlier in the game has an spell, Hell's Music, that blasts the enemy with sonic waves that will either: do nothing, confuse them, or kill them. Naturally only normal enemies can be affected by this. However, thanks to the fact that the Berserker is literately a step away from complete mental breakdown it is EXTREMELY weak to this attack. One use of this spell will literally turn this Nightmare Fuel inducing battle into a Breather Boss one.
Walkthrough Mode
- And while we're at it, let's not forget the three Delilas siblings and Koru. Three straight one-on-one bouts of ranging difficulty (Che is pretty hard, Lu is weak, and Gi is average), followed by a 4th battle which you have to win in FIVE ROUNDS, or its an instant game over. Made slightly easier by the fact that you can save before the 4th battle, but if you're smart, you'll make that save a separate file, lest you be unable to beat this powerful SOB.
- Only the remixes of Caruban and the Berserker in Rogue's Tower are even capable of being called "easy" due to the fact that the game shows little in the form of mercy. Zeto and Xain are both Wake-Up Call Bosses to show the player that the Spirit command is more than a mere attack booster - if you don't use it when they prepare their big moves, you will regret it.
- I can't seem to get over Songi, however. My toughest character, with a Defender chain, a defense accessory, and my best hitpoint accessory, died in one normal attack while defending.
- The battle against Borgan in Lunar 2: Eternal Blue. Most only know of the version of the fight from the Playstation rerelease, which was merely nightmarishly hard. The original Sega CD version had more health and more power, making it a wonder that anyone ever got past him.
- The only real trick to beating him (at least in the Sega CD version) is to make sure you've upgraded your heal-all spell by that point.
I have no idea which of these is the hardest, but it's a long section full of Thread Mode. If I've made a mistake here I'll leave it up to someone to correct me.
- Granted, he's the Final Boss, but Magic Emperor Ghaleon was one hell of a That One Boss in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete. This troper has never had to attempt a final boss battle - or indeed, any boss battle at all - so many times before, and never has since. He and his friends are actually convinced that it is impossible to beat him on one's first try, because he only seems to (slightly) relent in his maelstrom of doomsday spells when you attempt him the second time and beyond.
- And yet he's so laughably easy in the Sega CD version.
Final Boss
Taken off of Star Ocean 4:
- Before that you had to face a Miniboss squad of Phantom soldiers and leaders. In a 9 chain battle back to back. It wouldn't be difficult, if it wasn't for the soldier's rapid fire range attack that can disrupt casting and their powerful bombs and the leader's auras that makes them all made of iron and boost their attacks that can rip your Symbologists apart. Fourtinately the aura can be Voided but still you have to go though 9 battles without rest, and at one point fight a group with two leaders....
Mostly because I don't think this fight is harder than the other listed boss, and this section on them is needlessly long and wordy.
- Magnius and Botta and Yuan in Tales Of Symphonia.
- Sylph, especialy on hard and mania difficulties. The Sylph fight, unlike most, is an actual team battle, and all of them have an extremely cheap trait. One is a sniper that can teleport, the leader uses a BFS with high speed and attack to boot, and the worst of the lot is their magic user, who fights with a tower shield, and in addition to her powerful spells, can quite easily take out any party member with one hit when she rams you with said shield. The frantic nature of the battle makes it that much more difficult.
- Kvar is far tougher than Magnius. You can either go straight for Kvar and let his Energy Stones interrupt your combos over and over, giving Kvar ample time to beat the hell out of you, or try to take out the Energy Stones first while Kvar beats the hell out of you anyway. Even if you take out the Energy Stones, Kvar will keep slinging spells and in all likelihood destroy you.
- Those Energy Stones are annoying enough even if it weren't for Kvar. They're annoying as hell in melee and resistant to every ranged attack out there.
Left in the fight with the three dragons because it sounds like the hardest. If I'm wrong, someone reverse me with one of these six or seven bosses, please.
- And another Tales of Phantasia example: Neo-Dhaos, in the final battle, can make himself constantly impossible to hit while throwing painful attacks. He's actually quite the threat to a level 99 party.
Final Boss
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Okay, I don't know enough about World Of Warcraft to fix it, although I may do some Thread Mode cleanup later.
Looks like Kingdom Hearts was mostly Thread Mode gibberish and people saying, "I know this isn't really an example, but..." So that got nuked pretty hardcore.
I'll be back later for more cleanup, but I've been at this for hours, and I'm but a man.
Wild Knight: Thank you for most of the cleanup, but I must ask: ...why does being a Final Boss disqualify them from the trope? Yes, they're expected to be hard, but they're still part of the main storyline. If the player's goal is to complete the story and see the ending, final bosses are still very capable of being brick walls in the player's way to that goal, unlike optional bosses where you have to go out of your way to fight them. Was there a consensus on this that was reached that I am unaware of?
Shrikesnest: Well, we talked about it some on the forums and determined that Final Boss could be That One Boss under the following circumstances:
- 1) He's much, much harder than the other bosses in the game, or
- 2) He requires the use of a strategy that isn't needed in the rest of the game, or
- 3) He requires an amount of grinding that is disproportionate to the rest of the game, or
- 4) He's in a game where there are different character paths with different final bosses; one of them could be much harder than the others
But that's kind of a complicated list to put on the front of each and every That One Boss page, and the general worry on the forums is that putting "some final bosses count" means we'd get every single final boss that wasn't Yu Yevon again.
Wild Knight: True...The "hard even by their own standards" note on the main page seems to be a good summary and a decent compromise on the issue, though. Sorry if I sounded a little incensed before...but Ghaleon literally is the most difficult boss I have ever faced in my life. >.>
sci: Neverwinter Nights 2 - shouldn't that be a puzzle boss ? Sure, they do some damage, but so does everything else, yes, they won't die normaly, but their hp are not that high. The really problem is that their regeneration knocks whoever is reading that damn scroll down and thus interrupts them. Once you make sure your party doesn't damage them, pick them up one after another once you've had someone read the scroll successfully. At that point in hte game, if they take more than 2 seconds each, you did something wrong (remember, Leaked Experience + averted Arbitrary Headcount Limit = a lot of ways to mow things down). Of course, if you know what you are doing, one second for all three is more like it until you puzzle them out.
I'm not very good with editing wiki's and would be afraid of breaking the format on the trope page, however I believe there is something missing from the Final Fantasy grouping of That One Boss. That being the Stone Gargoyles at the end of disk 3 in FF 8. You only had two of your party members and, if you did not know about this enemy before hand (I certainly didn't for several a play-through) you would be treated to a boss who would cast petrify on both members of your party, forcing a game over.
