Anti Climax Boss / Video Games

Examples of Video Game boss fights that were over far too quickly. Click here to return to the main trope entry.

Video Game sub-types with their own pages:

• Role-Playing Games

Adventure Games

• At the end of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Episode 5: 8-Bit is Enough, Strong Bad confronts Trogdor and simply slashes the dragon's body, killing him right then and there. Strong Bad then lampshades this by saying with disappointment, "Well, that was a little anti-climatic." But then, Strong Bad becomes an evolved, futuristic, mutated version of himself. Then a much more powerful and evolved form of Trogdor appears. And then, the REAL battle with Trogdor begins!

Action-Adventure

• Evil Bomber in Bomberman Hero. After getting 5s on every level on the first five planets to unlock the sixth planet — the toughest part of which is probably getting 5s on the boss levels — and going through two of the most insane levels in the game, you get to the last boss and...he's about as tough as Nitros, at worst.

• Castlevania:
  • You slug your way through Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, enter Dracula's castle with the kickass music, make your way slowly to his altar, re-assemble his body parts... then proceed to kill him with fire before he can even get out of his entrance animation. Even if you don't use the Game-Breaker fire weapon, he's still ridiculously easy. He goes around and around in circles, and doesn't do much else; all you have to do is stand in the corner and throw daggers.
  • Dracula in the first game starts off as a challenging foe, with his minuscule weak spot you have to jump to hit, fireball attacks that spread just enough to be tricky to avoid or deflect, and love of teleporting directly on top of you for a pile of Collision Damage. His final form looks tougher, but is far slower and more predictable, and doesn't do much aside from jump around the room. On top of that, he's also become weak to holy water, to the point that with a bottle of the stuff and a Triple Shot (the former of which is even in the boss room), you can straight-up stunlock Dracula's last form and hit him with holy water until he dies. Even with his high damage, he's nothing compared to the Platform Hell beforehand.
  • While much harder, Dracula is still nothing special in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Despite having 10,000 HP and being able to hit pretty hard, it is very possible to beat him without any familiars, spells, or even items, since all that HP is shared among his three heads, making it possible to do three times the damage per hit that you'd normally do. He's still significantly harder than most of the bosses in the game, though.
  • There's also his Super Castlevania IV incarnation. Most of his attacks are easy to dodge with the possible exception of the second one; however, you can actually get healed after that attack (if you attack it), and he uses it on two occasions.
  • Dracula Wraith in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. His first form is just classic Dracula, which is really easy to dodge in this game, and his second form is a giant eyeball... thing. It's basically an amalgamation of the body parts you had to collect to get to this point. Its only attacks are to shoot a beam, which can be dodged by simply crouching, and to swing his arm at Juste, which can be dodged by being at the edge of the room. Sometimes he uses these two attacks at the same time, but this can also be dodged by crouching and then sliding to the end of the room.
  • Castlevania: Lords of Shadow continues the series' tradition of underwhelming final boss fights, this time with Satan. He does a pretty credible impression of a challenging boss, with lots of health, potent and hard to avoid attacks that can be chained to devastating effect, the ability to summon groups of dangerous adds, and the same mechanic from the utterly brutal Silver Warrior fight, in which the player has to rapidly cycle between light and shadow magic in order to do more than Scratch Damage. He could easily be That One Boss himself, except for one thing: so long as the player hits him with the right type of magic, each successful attack restores a preposterous amount of health. A single hit can bring back 20-25% of Gabriel's health, so the sort of 3-hit chain that any player who has gotten this far can execute in their sleep can restore one from critical to near-full. Oh yeah, and this is the one fight in the game in which Gabriel's magic gauges can never run out.

• Daikatana:
  • Mikiko. After a fairly intense battle with Kage, you think you're done, but wait, one last fight...that will go down in two shots, tops. After an entire game of the poor AI keeping you from doing anything, shooting this final boss will give the player more satisfaction than anything else in this game.
  • Kage Mishima's no Spring Chicken himself; despite being a melee-oriented enemy, he's very slow, making it very easy to just back away from him and unload your best heavy gun into his face. He does have a ranged attack where he sends a wave of ghosts at you, but that can also be avoided by running in circles.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Arius-Argosax from Devil May Cry 2. As Lucia's final boss and looking so disturbing and freaky, you'd think that this monstrosity could put up a good fight. Instead, despite its size and even if you get hit from its moves, you'll likely be able to kill it by standing still, throwing daggers non-stop, and just move out of the way of its poisonous attack or towards the other end of the crevice you're in.
  • Sanctus Diabolica of Devil May Cry 4 is one of the easiest final bosses (and possibly bosses period) in the series by a wide margin, with attacks that, while reasonably hard hitting, are choreographed from so far away that they can be dodged blindfolded, low defenses, and an "ultimate attack" that can be easily turned back on him to inflict even more damage. He is, in fact, easier than his Disc-One Final Boss form half-way through the game; which, while not especially challenging, at least has a rectangular arena that makes him harder to catch, a smaller window to attack him in, and no "ultimate attack" besides the Savior's downward punches, which can also be used against him.

• Sir Kael, the main villain in episode 2 of The Last Resurrection. When you finally meet up with him, he's standing still, facing the wall and not even noticing you. All you have to do to kill him is walk up and touch him.
• Legacy of Kain:
  • Despite being one of the most powerful beings in existence, doing battle with Kain in Soul Reaver isn't very impressive in comparison to his sons. Each time you fight him, you only need to smack him three times while he stands still and shoots lightning bolts at you, and then you watch a cutscene. This is because Soul Reaver had a quarter of its content cut, including the original Final Boss and ending, which would've likely had a far grander final encounter with Kain, instead of what was included in the final product.
  • The end of Soul Reaver 2, and the closest thing the entire game has to a boss encounter. It's completely impossible to die because the Reaver keeps your health at maximum, and you can't even drop the sword to give yourself a challenge. Thanks to this, the final encounter against Sarafan Raziel becomes drawn out, but still unchallenging.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ganon is either this or a Hopeless Boss Fight, depending on whether you have found the Silver Arrows. Even though he's invisible and constantly teleporting, his projectiles, while easy to hit you, just don't do enough damage to an endgame-ready Link, while his hitpoints are few, meaning that attacking the air and dodging occasionally will be plenty to get in the needed three hits and bring him down.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: Hot Head, the next to last boss. Despite his only attack (the lava particles from when he submerges) doing four hearts of damage, it is very possible to stunlock him with the Fire Rod. The flames from the fire rod that stay for a few seconds can stunlock him, giving you free hits on him. It's possible to defeat him after dousing his flame shell, never submerging again.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Ganondorf is a Tennis Boss and not even a good Tennis Boss. A previous boss called Phantom Ganon, which is supposed to be weaker than the real Ganondorf, is more challenging, as the arena you fight him in is much smaller, giving you less time to react to the blasts; plus he has another phase, a Shell Game with the background paintings, also making him less predictable than Ganondorf. The only advantages the real Ganondorf has over his phantom double are his massive damage and the fact you have to use magic to stun him, but you can replenish both hearts and magic if you still struggle with the fight. Even in his Ganon form, where his attacks will do a massive amount of damage if they connect, he's still a complete joke, as he's incredibly slow with equally slow attacks. Beating him is as simple as rolling under his legs and whaling on his tail over and over again.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: Ganon from the linked game. His attacks, while strong, are very slow and predictable, allowing you to go up to him, spin attack, then use Pegasus seeds to get away before he launches his attack. To top it all off, he doesn't have a final form and is weaker than the vanilla bosses of each game and the boss just before him.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Zant takes you to previous boss arenas and requires you to use the same item used against it. Once you figure that out, he becomes simple, and he is not helped by the small number of attacks he possesses. Even the final phase, where he takes out swords, is easy because it boils down to waiting until he stops attacking and hitting him. While he takes a lot of punishment, he can't dish it out, as most of his attacks take a quarter of a heart, just like those of the weakest enemies.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: The final battle can easily end up as this for aggressive players. When you start actually fighting Malladus, he will almost never attack if you constantly hit him with your sword (this is actually the point of the battle, to get Malladus to face away from Zelda so she can shoot him in the back). The short "short" sequence before this is also nearly impossible to fail, as Zelda, whom you must defend from Malladus' flaming boulders while she charges her magic, will never die if she gets hit, but simply lose focus. You lose health if Zelda is hit, but the flaming boulders tend to drop recovery hearts.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • Calamity Ganon, if you free all the Divine Beasts and acquire the Master Sword before facing him. Doing so allows the Divine Beasts to attack Ganon at the start of the fight, cutting his health in half, and gives you an extremely powerful and practically unbreakable weapon to finish him off. And depending on how much of the rest of the game's Wide-Open Sandbox you've completed (which is likely a sizeable amount if you've managed to free all the Divine Beasts), you may also have a large amount of hearts and good armor, making him even less of a threat. The catch is that you can go straight to him from the very beginning, and he can make you regret it.
    • The final battle with Dark Beast Ganon. In spite of looking great and its amazing music, the fight essentially boils down to shooting the glowing weak points on Ganon's body with light arrows. While he hardly ever tries to move or turn around. And even though he hits hard, this is only if he actually hits you, as his only real attack is firing slow, predictable mouth lasers at you. The anticlimax can be somewhat mitigated on speed runs, as your lack of equipment will certainly make the fight much harder, since you risk being killed in one hit if you have weak gear and you must land the last hit while in his line of sight. The rest of the fight is still not too difficult.
  • The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games:
    • Link: The Faces of Evil has Ganon. All you have to do is throw the Book of Koridai at him, and..."No! Not into the pit! It burrrrrns!!!" Also in The Faces Of Evil, a single bomb in the Glutko's mouth kills it.
    • Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon: Zelda just has to throw the titular Wand at Ganon to defeat him: "The chains! NOOOO! You haven't seen the last of me!"
• In The Little Mermaid, Ursula's One-Winged Angel form is even easier than her first form. Her only new power is the ability to control the water current, which can be easily overcome, and there are no starfish or urchins this time.

• In Masters of the Unverse: The Movie on C64, in the fight against Skeletor, all you do is knock him closer to the edge of the stage until he falls off while trying to avoid his Eye Beams.
• The titular Hydra of the freeware Galius-like Meikyuujou Hydra is a complete joke, mainly because you can safely position yourself under its four heads and send a constant stream of axes into them. Once the heads are gone, all the Hydra can do is charge at you, and the headless body goes down in just a few hits.

• The Shadowlord in NieR is this, particularly if you are fighting him on a second, third, or fourth playthrough. Sold as a badass, protective father in a Crapsack World, the final battle consists of dodging (read: rushing through with a spear) insane waves of magic until you get close enough to strike him. After three hits, he's down and the game is over; his badassery from before not even dignified a handwave (although there was a bit of a hint that he'd lost the will to live).

• Widget from Overlord: Dark Legend could easily be killed by just standing out of the reach of his flamethrower and letting the red Minions attack him with their fireballs from a small ridge. Since they are standing on a higher level than he is, his close combat attacks won't reach them and he only attacks them with the flamethrower, which they are immune to. Then you have to wait until he dies and realize that this was the final boss.

• The final battle in the official tie-in game to The Phantom Menace makes it possible to kill Darth Maul in just a few seconds by Force-shoving him into a Bottomless Pit. While this is (somewhat) faithful to the film, it does make it look kind of ridiculous that Maul was able to dispose of Qui-Gon so easily just beforehand.

• Resident Evil:
  • Saddler from Resident Evil 4. As the final boss in a game filled with tough, memorable boss fights, you'd think his fight would be pretty epic. But that isn't the case, with an obvious weak spot, a surprisingly low amount of health, and attacks that do relatively little damage. Plus, the fight takes place in an area that contains several traps which can be used against him, making the fight even easier. He provides a more challenging fight against Ada in Separate Ways, but in the last part of the battle (which corresponds to Leon as per the main story), all she has to do is speedrun through the towers of the island's pier while dodging a few enemies to reach the rocket she's supposed to throw to Leon for him to finish Saddler instantly.
  • Chief Bitorez "Big Cheese" Mendez can be defeated by four well-placed incendiary grenades, two for each phase. Not counting any acquired from random drops, there are eight fixed grenades you can pick up before the fight.
  • Krauser. Remember Leon's advice to Ada that knives work better for close encounters? The knife deals a massive amount of damage to Krauser and can trivialize the encounter.
  • Birkin's final form in Resident Evil 2 is just a giant blob who can't even hit you if you don't stand next to him.

• The final boss of Saints Row 2. The first 3 are fairly epic in their own right, including an ATV vs Jeep fight in a mall and a sword fight on a burning ship. The pre-boss fight was hell in a handbasket, using a helicopter to fend off other helicopters while attacking several gate locks in order to get at the guy. The final boss? Dane Vogel in his office, who you can quickly proceed to blow up with a well-placed satchel charge. Even the lead-up to it isn't that great, making it feel like the whole thing was just put in for a final mission arc.
• Even though he's the leader of The Five, and actually knocks Mike on his ass in the cutscene where he's finally introduced, Dr. Victor Batrachian from Shadow Man is far and away the easiest boss to kill. Given as how he had depopulated an entire prison over the preceding 72 hours without even bothering to unstrap himself from the electric chair, the fact that he comes after you with a baton is a little embarrassing.
• While the game is otherwise known as Nintendo Hard, Shadow of the Beast has a surprisingly easy final boss whose attacks are very predictable and easily avoided. Unlike all the other bosses in the game, this one doesn't require a special weapon to be defeated, either.
• Shantae: The games has a pattern of giving the players a relatively easy penultimate boss fight before bringing in the absolutely brutal Final Boss. For the plot-critical examples:
  • Shantae (2002): Despite being much-hyped as a Doomsday Device, the All-Purpose Steam Powered Tinker Tank has little defense against Shantae since the Tinkerbats had apparently forgotten to install anti-personnel weapons on it. The only way it could damage the Half-Genie heroine is if she falls on the tank treads or stands in front of its two steam vents, both of which are trivial to avoid since she has the Harpy form by that point. It's not quite to Zero-Effort Boss levels, since you still need to figure out how to destroy it, but you have all the time in the world to do so.
  • Shantae and the Pirate's Curse: The Pirate Master, the Final Boss, is this if you fail to collect all 20 Dark Magic. With only two kinds of attacks that are easily blocked or avoided, and a lot of moments where he leaves himself wide-open to a series of hair-whips, there's a reason why he's one of the easiest bosses to defeat in the game without taking any damage^note Second only to the first boss in the game according to the Global Steam Achievements stats. Of course, if you do manage to collect all 20 Dark Magic, he will then change to his true form for a real challenge.

• Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989) is this. He has very damaging attacks, but he is the only enemy in the game who can be knocked back by attacks, and his AI is also bad. It's possible to jump onto the right side platform and spam projectiles in his general direction, or even just corner him in the correct spot and smack him whenever he pulls his weapon out.
• While all of the boss battles in Tomba! are fairly easy, the battle against the Final Evil Pig is especially pathetic. He can only harm you via Collision Damage since his sole spell simply freezes you in place for a few seconds, there are no environmental hazards, and worst of all, he goes down just as easily as any of the other Evil Pigs: one toss into the Evil Pig Bag, and roll credits. Thankfully, the sequel takes deliberate measures to avert the trope by turning his arena into a pit-filled deathtrap, giving him attacks that actually hurt you, and requiring five tosses into the bag to finish him off.
• Tomb Raider: Quite a few examples in the series.
  • Tomb Raider I: Natla goes down from just a handful of bullets. Even the basic handguns can take her down.
  • Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness:
    • Eckhardt; as you can literally dodge most of his attacks by just ducking, and even if you do get hit, it doesn't damage you that much anyway.
    • Joachim Karel, if he could even count as a boss. All you have to do is run away from him. Considering that he's a powerful Nephilim, you'd think he'd be a little more challenging.
  • This trope is parodied in the Tomb Raider custom game "Simply Purple". Roaring sounds are heard, the player is bombarded with medipacks and other supplies, ominous music plays, and... the boss is a little dwarf that can't even attack Lara properly.
• True Crime: Streets of LA: General Kim is the Anticlimax boss of the worst ending, a rather feeble opponent who can be taken down with repeated jumpkicks. If you play each ending in order, General Kim is surprising for two reasons; being the actual Big Bad of the final ending, and being a Climax Boss requiring more fighting skill than any other fight and a tough driving-shooting challenge.
• True Crime: New York City has two ending paths. The "bad" ending ends in a simple 2-dimensional Good Old Fisticuffs fistfight against the police captain in a cramped subway car (where you simply punch him until you back him off the screen and off the train), which is rather anticlimactic compared to some of the insane Kung Fu boss fights earlier in the game (including a sword fight against a 7-foot tall Black Samurai Rap Star). Contrast that with the original True Crime: Streets of LA, where the "true" final boss, General Kim, was the best fighter in the game, and the only opponent you had to beat with strategy (mostly blocking then counterattacking) instead of simply button mashing.
• ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal: The game is built on a complicated Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system involving 12 different elements. You can have up to five fairies in your party, and so do the enemy duelists. Thus you have to build your party from fairies of elements that cover each other's weaknesses, and higher-level duels involve frantically flipping through your party to find the best match-up to your current enemy (with the enemy duelist doing the same). The Final Boss, however, has fairies of only one element. A single high-level fairy that's strong against this element can easily take them all out.

Beat 'em Ups

• In Batman: Arkham Asylum, Killer Croc is heavily built up as a massive threat, with a torn-apart animal cage with skeletons in it, the patient diaries where he bites a man's hand off, and the fact that he's a Nine-Foot-Tall lizard man. When you face him, he's more a stage hazard than an enemy, where all you have to do is slowly walk across platforms, occasionally tossing a batarang if he decides to show his face.
  • Joker. All you do is run in circles, wait for him to get bored, and beat up his mooks before pulling him down with the Batclaw and punching him in the face while he's stuck in the ground. This repeats three times. Honestly, the previous fight with the Titan henchmen and army of mooks was harder.
• The Sequel, Batman: Arkham City, has the fight against Penguin. After a surprise Puzzle Boss Fight with Solomon Grundy, who hits very hard, moves surprisingly fast, and has three stages, The Penguin decides to fight you himself. Alone. One quick Batarang and a few punches later, he's down for the rest of the game.
• Batman: Arkham Knight, the final game in the main trilogy, has a lot of these as a side effect of completely eschewing hand-to-hand boss battles and Puzzle Boss confrontations in favor of Batmobile battles and barely interactive cutscenes. Of particular note:
  • Man-Bat is built up as a hulking, inhuman monstrosity that has already brutally murdered at least one person, and could surely give Batman a challenging fight. He does not attack, and you beat him by tracking him down throughout the campaign and flying into him like you would a drone, whereupon Batman doses Man-Bat with a syringe of antidote in a non-interactive cutscene.
  • Firefly, who was the subject of an epic boss fight in Batman: Arkham Origins, here simply flies away while you chase him in the Batmobile and occasionally lobs a fire attack into the road below. When you catch up to him, it takes a simple button press to take him down.
  • Azrael was heavily built up in City, where he appeared out of nowhere to warn of the third game's events and exhibited quasi-supernatural abilities. He is also shown to be Batman's equal in combat here, having extensively studied his style. Batman never goes toe-to-toe with him, and the final confrontation consists of the player making a choice from Azrael's perspective; if he chooses to kill Batman, Batman will instead counter and punch him out in a cutscene.
  • Hush got away from the previous game with the promise to become the calculating, competent foe he was in his famous storyline, having already sewn together a replica of Bruce Wayne's face and implicitly going to utilize the fear gas found in his lair. His side quest is the shortest one in the game, spanning about three minutes and one scripted counter-attack, and his scheme is laughable: walking into Bruce's office and attempting to drain a large sum of money from the account, without taking into account any possible security measures. The fear gas tease is never followed up on.
  • The battle with the Arkham Knight has become infamous in the fandom for this reason. Every encounter in the story builds him up as Batman's physical equal and a schemer who knows everything about the Dark Knight. However, the anticipated fistfight or Mr. Freeze-esque Final-Exam Boss never comes — you engage him twice in the Batmobile, once to destroy the Cloudburst and the other while outrunning his excavator. After his unmasking as Jason Todd, he takes up sniper positions around the room and you simply have to sneak through normal mook-filled stealth sections while avoiding his small circle of vision. After this "battle", he undergoes a Heel–Face Turn and disappears until the ending.
  • Deathstroke, your opponent in what was likely the most intense battle in the series aside from Mr. Freeze and one of the most skilled combatants in the comic universe, returns to Gotham after the Arkham Knight's battle and takes up command of Scarecrow's militia, challenging you personally after all of the security checkpoints and watchtowers have been taken down. You fight him in the Batmobile while he is in a tank and surrounded by equally large tanks, in what is almost an exact clone of the first Arkham Knight fight. After the tanks are disabled, Batman takes him out in a cutscene with a single punch.
  • Finally, Scarecrow has no semblance of a proper Final Boss battle, despite fans waiting the entire series to take him down. After mentally defeating Hallucination!Joker, Batman becomes immune to the concentrated fear toxin, breaks free of his restraints, and shoves Scarecrow's needles into his own neck, condemning the man to a life of paralyzing fear. The grappling for the needles plays out identically to numerous other Press X to Not Die segments in gaming, but there is not even a button-mashing segment to go along with it.
• Done intentionally with Electrocutioner in Batman: Arkham Origins, where it looks like you're about to have a difficult battle against him, only for him to go down with a single punch.
• Dragon Ball Z Legacy of Goku 2 has this with the final battle against Cell. Since your 11th-Hour Superpower is ridiculously overpowered even by that trope's standards, you cannot lose against what is statistically the strongest enemy in the game, even if you actually try to lose. Well, that's what the fight was like in the series the game is based on.
• The final boss of the first Kunio-kun game (Renegade being the American localization), an evil Yakuza boss named Sabu, is depressingly easy to beat. Although he's the only baddie who uses a gun and can kill with one hit, he can only shoot along one single trajectory, so all you have to do is duck right in front of him and keep whaling on him until he goes down.
  • In River City Ransom for the NES, the final boss, Slick, is quite easy compared to the second-to-last fight against the Dragon Twins. Even more so if you have two players.
  • In the GBA remake Slick is a beast of a fight, using telekinesis powers — he still isn't as strong as the Dragon Twins, but he's not a trivial fight anymore.
• In Two Crude Dudes, the last boss is a pint-sized scientist in a labcoat who can't do anything except run around and ineffectually thump you while you kick the bejesus out of him. Unfortunately, once you've had your fun, he mutates into a pretty badass Sequential Boss.
• In Urban Reign, after proceeding through most of the game solo taking on various criminals, gang members, psychopaths, martial artists, and a couple of giants that the game simply describes as "monsters", the last boss is none other than the corrupt Mayor, who dies with about 2-3 punches. But he's the only one who uses a gun, and the game doesn't hesitate to make its damage realistic.
• In Warriors of Fate, the final boss, Akkila Orkhan (a fictional version of Cao Cao) is pathetically easy to kill with only a small health bar and a minor thrown bomb attack. However, he is also a Time-Limit Boss, and if you don't kill him within the fifteen second time limit, he escapes and you get the Bad Ending. He is still easy to beat even within those fifteen seconds.

Driving Games

• The first Wizpig encounter in Diddy Kong Racing is infamously brutal, requiring perfect play or glitches to clear. The second (and final) Wizpig race is considerably more forgiving thanks to more freedom of maneuverability and not needing anywhere near perfect play.
• In LEGO Racers 2, the first three bosses are challenging opponents who each have a gimmick: Sam Sanister has a super-fast car, Gypsy Moth pilots a Humongous Mecha, and the Berg is a snow monster who races you on foot. Defeating them all lets you go to Xalax, where you race aliens on crazy, gravity-defying tracks in order to challenge the Final Boss, Rocket Racer... who's just a normal driver, raced on a track that's nothing more than a circle with force fields scattered around as obstacles and small ramps so you can jump over them. He's by far the easiest boss in the entire game, and his track is the least interesting, which can be disappointing when one considers that he was a much more challenging opponent in the first game.
• All of the so-called "Kings" in Need for Speed: ProStreet are average-at-best letdowns, but Nate Denver, the Speed King, takes the cake. The races he specializes in are long distance sprints across barren highways, emphasizing high top speeds with minimal-yet-hypersensitive turning, essentially supercar territory, and a cutscene at the start of his mission line boasts that "Big" Nate's tuned '65 Pontiac GTO can exceed speeds of 200mph. And yet in your big showdown with him, Nate never pushes his ol' Goat past a (comparatively) leisurely 130-140mph, which is painfully slow compared to the Skyline R34s, Murciélagos, and Zondas you've blown past to reach him, making the final Speed races a cakewalk.
• Stage 20^note Stages are displayed 20 at a time; to progress to the next group of 20 stages, you need to beat the current block of 20 stages first. of Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune and its sequel pit you in a showdown with the Blackbird and the Devil Z. Said showdown ends on the straight 5-kilometer stretch of the Wangan Line, where the opponent AI is trivial to beat so long as you don't run into any walls or traffic cars.

Fighting Games

• In BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, the final boss for Hakumen's Arcade Mode is Ragna. Not the Unlimited version, just normal Ragna. As a result, while not a pushover, Hakumen still has it easier than most. To further reinforce the anticlimax-ness, the fight before him is (non-Unlimited) Nu.
• Bushido Blade 2:
  • The Shainto clan face an insanely difficult boss battle, but after this enemy is finally killed, the player learns that he was merely The Dragon and the true leader of the Narukagami is... an unarmed young woman kneeling in the next room. She patiently awaits her death, but the player can choose to spare her if so inclined.
  • The boss that the Narukagami clan face in Bushido Blade 2 tries to put up a fight, but one blow to his armored front stuns him, and one more blow to his unprotected back kills him. The end.
• The demon god Demigra in Dragon Ball Xenoverse starts out as a texture-swap of Whis, who is a tricky opponent, but you've already beaten him multiple times in significantly harder missions. Then he goes One-Winged Angel and... he's basically a joke. His strategy is to hover, firing slow-moving projectiles that don't do much damage, while you charge up finishing move after finishing move. There's an Easter Egg ending if you beat him in under two minutes. Some people achieve it by accident.
• In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Battle of Aces, Material D, the Ruler of Darkness, is normally a decent fight, being a far more powerful Evil Twin of Hayate… except in Reinforce's story mode, where she serves as the final boss. This is because the game hands you Unison Reinforce, who has all eighteen skills in the game, making her a fast, tanky, barrier breaking, auto-guarding, Mana saving, healing, speedy Mana and Sprint Meter-recovering Purposely Overpowered character with high damage on all ranges that could use her plentiful stocks of Super Modes with impunity since she gets them all back after every round. Needless to say, you'd have to try hard just to lose a round.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Shinnok in Mortal Kombat 4 definitely qualifies, seeing as you've known all along how he fights and he doesn't offer that much of a challenge like, say, Shao Kahn did in previous installments. And it's not just because you can regularly select him: Rubber-Band A.I. just doesn't seem to work on him like it did for Shang Tsung and Quan Chi in Deadly Alliance.
  • Fighting Game veterans, and even some who've never played a Mortal Kombat game before, would find Shao Kahn this across the different installments. His taunts run in a pattern, which give fighters easy hits. Shao Kahn on the Game Gear is especially easy, as he has half the life of a normal contestant, and his attacks don't do any more damage than a normal fighter. Considering Kintaro can be beaten with simple strategy, one can play the game wondering why Mileena wasn't made the final boss.
  • In the Game Gear version of the first game, while Shang Tsung is still very hard, it falls onto Goro to be the letdown boss. Considering he is considered so iconic to the series, it's odd that Raiden is much harder to take down in the game, since Goro will only block when attacked, not retaliating unless you pause to rest your thumb (he can be beaten by continually hitting the "kick" button). It makes him feel like a chance to rest after those brutal endurance matches.
• Sonic the Fighters: After defeating the nearly impossible Metal Sonic, you are confronted by Dr. Robotnik in his Mecha Suit; you are also put in an Infinity +1 Sword state known as Hyper Mode. Dr. Robotnik will rarely get an attack off. However, this is probably to make up for the fact that the Death Egg II itself is about to go down, giving the player a very short window of time in which to defeat him. Hacking has shown that Robotnik has a wide range of (almost instant-kill-inducing) moves, so the decision to make the final stage a Curb-Stomp Battle was probably done so as to frustrate kids less after the difficult Metal Sonic battle.
• In the Adventure mode of Super Smash Bros. Melee, both Bowser and the optional Giga Bowser are a joke compared to many of the previous fights in the mode (especially on the higher difficulties, where the team fights can be downright brutal). Both of them are huge targets, which makes them incredibly easy to combo, and also have an easily exploited AI. The only thing that makes them remotely difficult is that in the odd event they do decide to use one of their stronger attacks and manage to connect with it, it can send you flying even at a low percentage.
• Tekken 3 has True Ogre, who is considerably easier to beat than both his standard form and the Heihachi battle that precedes both fights.
• In X-Men vs. Street Fighter, the (pre)-final boss is Apocalypse. While he looks impressive and his arm is almost as big as you are, he is quite easy to take down with most characters by simply jumping over the arm and using heavy punches repeatedly.

First-Person Shooters

• Alpha Prime has as its boss a man enslaved by an alien entity and turned into a giant abomination. Which shoots easy-to-avoid fireballs and goes down with a single hit from fixed lasers.
• In The Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena, you have bad guys who will do 1-2 blocks of your 5-6 blocks of health with every punch they land, mech suits, turret spiders, and big daddies {there's one level where you hijack one and carry a little girl on your shoulder}. The final boss is invincible — until you realise you can just walk up and pistol whip her out the elevator shaft.

• Bane, the final boss in Batman Doom, has 250 hit-points and a relatively simple pattern that consists of keeping a safe distance from him, wait for him to lunge at you or start talking smack, then bop him one when he's open.
• BioShock:
  • Fontaine in the first game. It's rather easy to beat him on Hard with the Chemical Thrower in rather short order, without even using any medkits or EVE hypos.
  • In BioShock 2, the final battle just throws a bunch of Mooks at you in a Hold the Line mission — something you've been through at least a dozen times before. You can even equip the Natural Camouflage tonic, stand somewhere out-of-the-way, and shoot out the pipes at the end to win with the least effort possible.
  • Most solo Boss battles, such as the first Big Daddy or Subject Omega, can be defeated with the drill alone — as the drill stops all opponents except the Big Sister moving while at the same time dealing large amounts of damage, all you need to do is go up to your enemy and start drilling.
  • Subject Omega is especially weak compared to your character at this point since you have the "Summon Elanor" plasmid, which summons your Big Sister/Daughter to fight. In fact, several Let's Plays ended up having Omega killed offscreen by Elanor, never even seeing the boss.
• The final boss of the hastily released, shoddily built Blacksite: Area 51 has literally no AI. After his short scripted behavior runs out, he literally can't do anything except stand in one spot and shoot at you.
• Tchernobog, the final boss of Blood (1997), had to get buffed a few times in patches due to how generally ineffectual he was at launch. Funnily, his anticlimax nature actually becomes more pronounced on higher difficulties. His Boss-Only Level is a Boss Rush where you have to face off against the prior three bosses... only due to Blood's fondness for the Degraded Boss, anyone good enough to get to Tchernobog on a higher skill has gone through levels where they had to beat multiples of the first two bosses, making a single one of each a relative breeze. Consequently, beating all three of them without expending too much in the way of resources will leave a whole level's worth of ammo, armor, and health to throw at Tchernobog, and Tchernobog's health is surprisingly low (in fact, it's the second lowest of the game's bosses). With enough Tesla Cannon ammunition and the Guns Akimbo hidden in his boss room, it is not at all unfeasible to kill Tchernobog before he even leaves his spawn area.
• Borderlands:
  • The Destroyer, the final boss, is an H.P. Lovecraft-esque alien abomination... which has one way to seriously damage you, a ranged attack launched from its tentacles. These are very easily shot off and take forever to regenerate. With the tentacles dealt with, you can just plink The Destroyer in its weak point until it's dead, periodically taking cover to easily avoid its other, highly predictable attacks.
  • Also Skagzilla. You place a corpse to lure him out, and a giant Skag the size of a building leaps out and does a huge epic screech which exposes his auto-crit weak spot for a good fifteen seconds.
  • Intentionally played for laughs with Slither. The god of a bandit cult, you arrive at the boss area to see an ominous crucifix, which fire swirls under as some of the most epic and ominous music the game has plays, and what emerges is... a scythid crawler, one of the weakest enemies in the game. And no, it's not a case of it turning out to be a Killer Rabbit — it can take quite a bit more punishment than a normal one and deal a bit more damage, but it's still pathetically easy. Even the quest giver is openly disappointed by this.
• In Borderlands 2:
  • Wilhelm is set up as a devastating combatant — the Guardian Angel is terrified of him, and the four protagonists from the previous game combined couldn't defeat him. But the actual boss fight is underwhelming, being annoying at worst. There's an in-story reason for this: letting you defeat him is part of Handsome Jack's Batman Gambit, as the power core Wilhelm gives you upon defeat ends up being sabotaged. Jack had also weakened Wilhelm with poison beforehand so that he would go down easier, but any indication of this was left out of the game for some reason, possibly by accident.
  • The final boss, The Warrior, can also qualify; just stand in the middle area, shoot his weak spot whenever he appears, and if you're fast-ish, he'll just flinch instead of attack.
  • After defeating Jackenstein, Professor Nakayama reveals himself, prepared to duel you mano a mano. Before the fight can truly begin... he trips down the stairs in front of him and takes repeated health damage until he dies. There is absolutely nothing you can do to speed this up or stop it, you just watch the Big Bad of the DLC trip and break his neck.
• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! plays it for laughs. One of the sidequests involves breaking into a heavily secured lab to destroy an unspeakable horror locked in a heavily secured lab. Multiple characters warn you that you should absolutely never enter the lab and face the monster. If you do, you find that the monster is a clone of the Destroyer from the first game...and it's about 1/20th the size of the real version, has only one attack that does piddling damage, and can be destroyed in roughly half a dozen shots.

• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare ends with you pulling out a pistol and shooting the Big Bad and his two bodyguards in the back while they're distracted by an allied helicopter. Even if you're really slow and give the Big Bad enough time to turn around and shoot you, you can still survive a shot or two from his Desert Eagle, giving you plenty of time to still cap him. The way the scene is set up, it manages to be surprisingly not anti-climactic. Rather the opposite.
• Call of Duty: World At War sort of avoids and uses this trope at the same time by not having a final boss. The last level is just like any other mission, except that the game ends with your character getting shot but successfully hoisting the Soviet flag on top of the Reichstag.
• Call of Juarez: Gunslinger: In the "Revenge" path, the final duel is a complete cakewalk, both for in-story and narrative reasons. Put simply, winning that fight isn't fulfilling, and considering that a major theme of the story is the futility of revenge, it isn't meant to be. The "real" last fight, against Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is significantly more difficult and rewarding.
• Clive Barker's Jericho has the Firstborn as its final boss, aka the very first being created by God, prior to Adam and Eve, and it is extremely powerful — it manages to kill both Cole and Jones by blasting them with lightning, causing them to explode into tiny little bits. Of course, once you actually start to fight it, its lightning blasts are unable to insta-kill your characters as seen in the aforementioned cutscene, and all you need to do to defeat it is to use the supernatural powers of the remaining characters. Some consider it the easiest boss in the game. Also, it takes the form of a small child. This wouldn't be so much of an anti-climax if you haven't seen the concept art of what the final boss was originally going to look like, however.

• At the end of The Darkness, mob boss Uncle Paulie takes refuge at the top of a lighthouse, where the light robs you of your Darkness powers and leaves you just an ordinary man... yet ultimately Paulie's still just a fat, old dude armed with a peashooter, and a single bullet to the gut brings him down.
• Deus Ex.
  • The ending involves Big Bad Bob Page lobbing threats at you while he's encased in a shielded anti-chamber, as he tries to merge with Helios. He never gets close to achieving his goal — no matter which ending you take (merge with Helios, destroy the communications hub, disable the shield unit), Page goes out like a whimpering punk. The worst is Morgan Everett's ending (kill Page) — to do so, you simply run around Area 51 to deactivate some power units. Page dies miserably seconds after you deactivate the final device.
  • Walton Simons is supposed to be the brawn to Bob's brains and the true physical challenge you have to overcome, which would've made Page's non-involvement more forgivable — after all, he's the mastermind, defeating him should be an ideological victory. Unfortunately, Simons, for all his bragging about wielding newer and improved version of augmentation technology, is a pushover. He has a powerful weapon, and he's accurate with it, but because of bugs, he doesn't use his augs properly, meaning you can kill him with a single missile, and his AI is really dopey, so he behaves almost like a rank-and-file mook.
  • In Deus Ex: Invisible War: JC Denton (an optional boss and the protagonist of the first game) is really weak for a Physical God.
  • Maggie Chow from the original game also qualifies. She is armed with a Cool Sword, but has no ranged weapons, and isn't remarkable in any other way. You can take her down with a single tranquilizer dart, or a single hit from your own Dragon Tooth Sword — and you can draw and swing it faster than she does hers.
• In Dishonored, Admiral Havelock. It's not even that easy to provoke him to a fight — you either kill him on the spot or walk past him to the final objective. If you do fight him, he goes down in a couple blows.
• Doom:
  • Many consider the boss of DOOM's third episode, the Spider Mastermind, easier than the boss of the second episode, the Cyberdemon. The Mastermind's biggest advantage is an autotracking chaingun attack, but the giant green outhouse in the middle of the arena means there's plenty of cover. If you found the BFG hidden earlier in the episode, you can sprint up in the creature's face and 1HKO it before its AI has registered that the fight has started.
  • The Cyberdemon himself poses comparatively little threat, though he was seen as That One Boss in the early days of the franchise. He's the embodiment of a Damage-Sponge Boss, with the highest health in the game (beating out even the Spider Mastermind) and rockets that chop off half your health in a single direct hit. But as he's usually fought in a massive open area, and his rockets, though faster than most projectiles in the game, are not hitscan weapons, he tends to be fairly easy for anyone who knows how to circlestrafe properly or anyone with a mouse-and-keyboard setup. Without the BFG, he's mostly a waiting game of how long it takes to whittle him down while he spams rockets ineffectually; with it, he's a downright pushover. Many fanmade maps tend to treat him as less a boss and more a beefy Elite Mook (same with the Spider Mastermind, to a lesser extent).
  • Both of the above are exacerbated in Doom II, where basically every encounter with the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind has some kind of gimmick making them way easier than they should be. For instance, in MAP 20, you encounter both of them in the same room... in a way nigh-guaranteed to make them hostile to each other, at which point the challenge becomes "wait for ten seconds and then kill the badly-injured survivor."
  • The Icon of Sin in Doom II makes the Spider Mastermind look like an SNK Boss. It consists mainly of a wall texture, and its only threat is the monsters spawning by it. How do you kill it? Activate the elevator, ride it up, take out your rocket launcher, and fire the rockets at the gigantic glowing red spot in the middle of its forehead a few times, and John Romero is dead. The only challenge comes from the fact that you have to time the shots to just before the elevator reaches the top, since the vanilla Doom engine has a vertically fixed camera, meaning that you have to ride the elevator three times to finish off the boss while enemies spawn like crazy. If you're the sort of person who plays with a source port that allows vertical mouselook, you don't even need the elevator.
  • Fanmade WADs and official expansions tend to inherit the problem of only really having the above trio to serve as bosses, despite usually being much harder to keep pace with the advancements in player skill and modern control methods. Unless they're willing to program in an entirely new boss, the most they can do is add more enemies to try to support the existing bosses, and/or put them together in combination with each other. The Plutonia Experiment's final boss, for instance, is basically just a Cyberdemon standing in front of a copy of the Icon of Sin — once the Cyberdemon goes down, the Icon of Sin becomes almost a formality.
  • Doom 64's final boss, the Mother Demon, shows up when you have the ludicrously overpowered Unmaker, and there's both an invincibility and a supercharge in the same room. Grab the supercharger and fire the Unmaker at her, and she tends to die in about ten seconds.
  • Far more damning is Doom³, in which the programmers had the right idea by making the Cyberdemon the final boss, but cocked it up by making him easier to kill than virtually any other enemy in the game. His rockets are fired rarely and are extremely easy to dodge, and he is taken down after a few hits with the game's superweapon that automatically hits after being charged up.
  • Doom (2016) repeated history with the Spider Mastermind as the final boss and comparatively disappointing. The two previous boss fights were both two-stage encounters and therefore more difficult than the Mastermind's single-stage fight. It's still a hectic and challenging single-stage fight, but it's very easy to end it thinking "wait, why isn't it turning red?"
  • Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods Part 2's Dark Lord plays with this trope, as he feels like a slog to fight. He can only be damaged at specific parts, but is inconsistent in when he leaves himself vulnerable. While you wait for him to leave himself open, he only throws out rather predictable attacks, and the backup he summons are very easily dealt with the Sentinel Hammer. The worst part is that he heals himself if he damages you with his sword, but it's also very easy to heal and restock during the fight as well. The entire fight devolves into waiting, using the Sentinel Hammer on mooks, more waiting, and damaging him hopefully without getting hit.
• Duke Nukem 3D's final boss, the Cycloid Emperor, suffers from basically the same issue as the Cyberdemon. He's big, he's scary, he's tough, he fires rockets everywhere... but he's also a giant target that barely moves, he's fought in a wide-open stadium with lots of room to maneuver, and all his attacks are projectile-based. Once you've killed the mooks in the area, all you need to do is keep moving and keep some distance, and he basically can't hit you while you unload all your ammo into him.

• Far Cry:
  • The first game:
    • After fighting against hordes of highly trained, heavily armed mercenaries and mutant trigen monsters with rocket launchers for arms, the final opponent, Doyle, is an unarmored scientist with a gun that isn't very impressive at this point.
    • While the Big Bad himself is an utter pain normally, he can also be turned into an anticlimax boss if you know his big weakness, his groin.
  • Far Cry 3: The final boss is beaten by a series of Quick Time Events, which represent a knife fight. If your reactions are fast enough, you can probably beat him on the first try. If not, it's a matter of learning the pattern. However, there is a big set-piece battle and a couple of cutscenes still to come before the end of the game.
    • Implied to be the case with Hoyt when Jason finally confronts him and engages the usual Boss Battle; however, the moment the sequence ends, Jason is standing in a room filled with the bodies of Hoyt's bodyguards. Jason has become so much of a Blood Knight at this point in the story that he probably already killed off Hoyt, but his mind couldn't comprehend that the man responsible for causing all the pain and anguish that Jason and his friends were put through was just easily killed off. So his mind concocted the entire Boss Battle to give him the satisfaction he desired.
• First Encounter Assault Recon:
  • In F.E.A.R. 2, Colonel Vanek goes down after a whack in the face and a shot to the head in a Button Mashing sequence.
  • Paxton Fettel, the psychic clone-commander from the original, is equally disappointing. After the game shows him as the semi-ultimate bad guy, you find him shellshocked from Alma's mental effects, and a single shot to the head drops him.

• Ithaka Wassali from Gene Troopers, a plot-relevant antagonist (in fact she's the Hidden Villain) who can be fought as a proper boss, or, if you took the right steps, have your allies disable her force field the moment you confront her. Without her defense, you put her down in two shots.

• The final battle of Half-Life 2 consists of about ten seconds of throwing little glowing balls at some metal plates while gunships fire at you. If you want, you can shoot little glowing balls at the gunships, and then shoot the metal plates.
• Halo:
  • In Halo 3, after fighting through hordes of heavily-armed aliens and bringing down not one, but TWO galaxy-threatening Big Bads, the final fight is an anticlimactic shootout against 343 Guilty Spark. It's anticlimactic not because he turns out to be the final enemy (players have been waiting to take him down ever since the very first game), but because he's ridiculously easy, having terrible aim with his uber beam weapon and making absolutely no attempt to dodge your slow-charging Wave-Motion Gun. Also sort of sad considering that Spark is quite possibly the least threatening character in the entire series, and he was really only doing his job protecting the Halo.
  • Neither Truth nor Mercy go out with the bang Regret did. Whereas Regret personally fought Chief using his heavily-armed Cool Chair and a compliment of Elite Honor Guards, both of his compatriots become victims of the Flood (and the Arbiter, in Truth's case) before you reach them, and die in cutscenes.
  • You never really fight the Didact in Halo 4: his last appearance has the player shove a grenade in his armor in a quick-time event, after which he falls off a bridge.
• The final shootout against Sgt. Duvall in Haze. You're equipped with an assault rifle (and can even bring a rocket launcher into the fight). He's got a pistol. For some reason, he can survive a ridiculous amount of damage, but that doesn't really help him since he can barely hurt you. It's probably so he's able to get through most of his long, pre-scripted Motive Rant before you manage to kill him.
• In Homefront, the final boss of the game is the exact same weaponry (tanks and helicopters) that you've been fighting throughout the entire game. The only difference is that you get to rearm anti-aircraft guns to take them out.

• Iron Storm: The "final boss" of this Alternate History game is a "rival fight" against a special forces officer who has some interesting tricks; he is equipped with multiple weapons (assault rifle, sniper rifle, machine pistol, and grenades), never stops running in circles around you, and can take several dozen bullet hits before dying. However, his head is completely unprotected and all it takes is a few bullets to the face to drop him. Pretty poor compared to the game's earlier 3 bosses, who are all equipped with full body metal armor and full-auto mini-rocket launchers.

• Jurassic Park: Trespasser's final boss (or technically only boss, since you aren't required to fight other large dinosaurs), the Alpha Raptor, is a slightly enlarged raptor that only takes a few more bullets to kill than a regular one, but is easier to hit due to its size.

• Killer7 is mostly a game based on plot, so a lot of these show up. The most notable is the very last opponent in the game. The Last Shot Smile simply runs away and, when cornered, stands still and waits to be shot to death. It has no attacks at all, and all it does is make you wonder who the heck it is.
• In the original Killzone, General Adams isn't very tough, being fairly immobile and taken out with two explosive shots on even the hardest difficulty.

• The Pfhor cyborg from Marathon is the only boss in the game. It has no attacks and dies with less than one load of your pistol, although its countless guards will kill you if you do something stupid. Very fast.

• The final boss of No One Lives Forever 2 is your typical Super-Soldier Giant Mook, but he has a painfully slow attack and can literally be killed in 2 or 3 seconds with the right weapon (i.e. explosive shotgun shells). All of the series' other bosses avoid this with clever programming (they have to be shot 20 times by any weapon, so you can't just headshot them with a rocket launcher and call it a day).
• The final boss in Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi is extremely easy if you have the Chalice: around 2 hits will usually kill him.

• Quake:
  • The first game's final boss Shub-Niggurath... she is inert. Literally. She does nothing but stay there with her tentacles swaying in the air; the challenge is in fighting a ton of high-level enemies standing between you and the teleporter, but when you do reach it, the horrible Eldritch Abomination, biggest of all bads, ruler of an entire evil dimension and invader of worlds, is killed... by telefragging.
  • The second chapter in the series features the Makron in the final level. While a fairly challenging boss in its own right, able to rapidly shoot its railgun and fire BFG blasts with impunity, any savvy players will have stockpiled a few quad damage and invulnerability bonuses. The game predicts this and strips your inventory of invulnerability bonuses before the fight, but it doesn't extend this to quad damages. Activate one, bring out the hyperblaster or chaingun, and the Makron doesn't stand a chance.
  • The final boss of Quake IV, the Nexus, which is essentially a giant brain, is pathetically easy — it simply rests there for you to shoot at it when its shield is down. The only challenge comes from the fact that it is sending regular enemies after you at the same time.

• The final confrontation with Strelok in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. He doesn't even try to fight you, you just watch him as he runs around the superstructure of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and simply snipe him until his energy shield fails (enemy Powered Armor mooks do spawn in to kill you while you're trying to do this, though).
• The Cyber Space boss-fight with SHODAN in the original System Shock. If you have upgraded pulsers, you can just park yourself wherever and spam the fire button for a few seconds. It's a little jarring how suddenly the end cutscene starts playing.
• For an insane computer who thought herself as a goddess, SHODAN from System Shock 2 is really a complete pushover, while the game was insanely hard (you always lacked ammunitions). Disable the shield with 3 ICE picks (bypassing the hacking minigame), shoot 2 EMP grenades. Shoot 6 EMP grenades to her shield, shoot her twice. Use your assault rifle with AP cartridges: just pull the trigger, and she is downed... And you still have bullets in your magazine. Deactivate her shield, jump over the ledge, and hit her at close contact. Or, if you're the OSA type, just spam cryokinesis for 12 seconds. And you are not even hit once while doing this!

• The Final Boss in TimeShift is the giant mechanical fortress you encounter at the very beginning, destroying the whole city. Instead of fighting it in a cool freeform boss battle, it's a stationary target that you just shoot at a few times from a rooftop a couple hundred feet away. What's worse is that you've known from the start of the game that the villain has the same kind of timesuit as you, and even though his is a beta version, you've been facing hundreds of Superpowered Mooks with time powers reverse-engineered by the Big Bad. So naturally the player expects an epic one-on-one battle against your evil counterpart, but no, what you get is not a battle but an execution.

• Unreal:
  • Although normally a decent fight, the Skaarj Queen at the end of Unreal can be taken down with a single shot from the beginning pistol if you've upgraded it fully and are charged up with a damage amplifier. ^note Only if you are on the unpatched version of the game, though.
  • Likewise, the Sealed Evil in a Can Tosc that you fight at the end of Unreal II: The Awakening can absorb a very large amount of damage and are armed with a number of one-hit-kill attacks, including an arm that fires a black hole. However, you're armed with the exact same weapon that kills them in one hit too.
  • The final level in Unreal Tournament III is just a duel between Akasha and Reaper and plays out like any other match.

• Wolfenstein 3-D:
  • Otto Giftmacher of E4M9 is by far the easiest boss in the game due to him carrying a Rocket Launcher as his only weapon and his rockets don't have the Hitscan ability of the bullet-based guns. The relatively slow velocity of the rockets make them pretty easy to dodge and he has the least amount of maximum health compared to the other bosses (even Dr. Schabbs has more health than Otto). In addition, the room he's in has no Mooks to provide support for him and contains four cutaway walls flanking the north and south sides that provide easy cover from his rockets, and there's another adjacent room with two more cutaway walls, giving you plenty of space to prepare for his rockets.
  • Dr. Schabbs of E2M9, while having more health than Otto Giftmacher, is still a relatively easy boss to deal with (unless you play on Death Incarnate difficulty, in which he becomes a Damage-Sponge Boss, somehow having the highest maximum health out of any boss in both Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny). He only attacks by throwing syringes at you, and like Otto, they are not hitscan, giving you time to dodge them. The only real difficulty in this level are the mutants who flank him for support to challenge you, and they are considerably more dangerous than Schabbs.
  • Gretel Grosse of E5M9 is this as well due to her being a gender-flipped carbon copy of her brother Hans from E1M9. The same strategies used against Hans also applies to Gretel, only this time the room she's in has two cutaway walls that give you good cover from her hitscan machine guns. However, after she's dead, she drops a key that leads to the final room which is full of heavily armed guards ready to surprise you upon opening it. Keep that in mind if you're expecting an easy finish of the fifth episode.

Hack and Slash

• In Bayonetta 2, the previously Nintendo Hard Final Boss Aesir has the Eyes of the World he is in possession of destroyed by Loki, subsequently losing his powers and becoming completely helpless as Bayonetta and Balder take him apart, with his health dropping like a rock at the slightest of scratches. It's also very satisfying after all the hell you've been put through.
• Lu Bu, of all people, becomes this in the battle of Xia Pi if you do well enough in Dynasty Warriors 5. Instead of staying around to fight, he tries to run off, gets captured, and gets executed for his trouble.
• After the brutal That One Boss Monsoon in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, you get to fight the biggest, evilest, most imposing member of the Winds of Destruction, their leader Sundowner... and he's actually pretty easy. Other bosses have to go through phases, but it's entirely viable if not easier to ignore his shield-gimmick and just flank him. Some players never even get to hear his Leitmotif insert because he just goes down so fast. While he's not the Final Boss, he's built up as the Big Bad until his death, after which it turns out he's just The Dragon to the real villain.
• Reiko in Onechanbara Vortex is That One Boss in Story Mode... but in Survival Mode, she's an Anticlimax Boss. She's now a one-stage battle — removing the painfully difficult second stage from Story Mode — and rather than being forced to use Aya, you can now field Anna or Saki against her, who are much more effective for this fight.
• In the Sega Master System port of Strider (Arcade), the formerly brutal Final Boss Meio is reduced to a Stationary Boss with a huge hitbox and wimpy bullet attacks. Worse, the home computer ports, also by Tiertex, cut the Meio battle entirely, ending after the mecha-gorilla boss rematch.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: For all the hype he gets, King Eredin of the Wild Hunt can be beaten using the simple Quen/Roll combo that Mooks fall for. Both of his generals (who are faced immediately prior to fighting him) are tougher fights. After constantly going on and on about how much better he is compared to Geralt, it is extraordinarily satisfying to prove him wrong.

MMORPG

• For the first day or so after the Vampire/Werewolf war in AdventureQuest Worlds ended, the boss of the war, a sparkly vampire by the name of Edvard, was the weakest war boss in the entire game (900 hit points and rather pathetic damage) in a Take That! against The Twilight Saga. He's since been upgraded to regular war boss status with 20,000 HP.
• Many of the raid bosses in EverQuest briefly turned into this due to an oversight on a single item: Donal's Chestplate of Mourning. This cleric-only breastplate allowed the wearer to cast a mana-free spell that completely healed the target, though the drawback was that it took 30 seconds to cast — longer than most tanks could survive without other sources of healing. Of course, if you have ten clerics with the chestplate, then it's a simple matter of getting the timing down by having the clerics each click their chestplate three seconds after the last one did, resulting in the tank recovering full hit points every three seconds. It was especially trivial because this rotation could be kept up indefinitely since it consumed no mana or charges. This oversight was eventually rectified by the game's developers so that any given player could only be healed by the Chestplate once every seven minutes.
• There's several boss fights in Final Fantasy XIV that fall into this due to Power Creep
  • Before patch 6.1, there were a few trials and dungeons at the end of 2.0 that fell into this.
    • Cape Westwind, the first 8-man instance, is this so much that it's common when vets find out someone is new to the fight (noted by someone who's watching the minutes long pre-fight cutscene) to tease the newbie by commenting how hard the fight is and talking about all sorts of strategies. This serves to make newbies who don't know better either more anxious or more hyped up for their first 8-man instance. The fight itself can be easily won by simply wailing on the boss and ignoring the mechanics, to the point where the fight itself is often shorter than the pre-fight cutscene.
    • While newbie teasing isn't quite as common in the last two dungeons of the 2.0 MSQ, the boss fights there are equally anti-climatic as bosses can go down quickly and similarly to Cape Westwind, you can basically ignore mechanics.
    • Even when the game was new, Lahabrea being the actual final fight of 2.0 was laughable, especially after battling the Ultima Weapon, the biggest threat to Eorzea at the time.
  • King Thordon at the end of the Heavensward story in Final Fantasy XIV is pathetically easy, despite being a primal and having a dozen knights aiding him in one portion of the fight. The mechanics the boss throws at you are things you have very likely seen before in other battles and even if you get hit, you won't get damaged too terribly even with gear that barely meets the minimum item level required to enter the fight. Despite the fact that the fight is very flashy and full of spectacle, it's quite easy. The optional "extreme" version of the same fight is a lot tougher.
• Shiro Tagachi in Guild Wars: Factions is extremely easy, especially when you consider that the missions you have to complete to get to him are rather hard or annoying.
  • Shiro takes a few... okay, a handful of awesome skills classes by the time you see him in Nightfall. The Lich, not so much.
  • Even easier than Shiro is the Undead Lich in Guild Wars: Prophecies. The lich has so many weaknesses it's not funny, and even if you don't kill him correctly and are forced to fight him twice, he's still a rather pathetic final boss.
  • In fact, you have to fight BOTH Shiro Tagachi and the Undead Lich AT THE SAME TIME in Nightfall! That's how easy they are.
  • Abaddon; after the likes of Varesh, the mission is far more laid-back and easy to complete.
• In Guild Wars 2, the hyped out end-game boss Zhaitan, one of the Elder Dragons, one of the most powerful beings in the GW2 universe, practically an Eldritch God, ended up as this. You don't get to fight him at all; you board a gunship and defeat waves of monsters while Zhaitan flies above you. Once all the waves of monsters are down, a cutscene shows Zhaitan getting shot; you and your group boards a bunch of cannons, and basically shoot him while he stands there staring, for 5 minutes. Even after the bug that prevented him from attacking you was fixed, it's still much less difficult than the fights that came before it.
• The final form of the Naughty Sorceress in the Kingdom of Loathing is a reality-altering sausage. She will kill you unless you have the Wand of Nagamar in your inventory, which turns her attacks against her in a hilarious way and ensures an instant win. Also, Ed the Undying has less HP each round. By the seventh round, it's all but impossible to take more than one turn to kill him.
• In RuneScape, it is not uncommon for high leveled players to do no quests, then do them when they can tackle a dragon without breaking a sweat and beat the stuffing out of huge monstrosities with little to no trouble. It ends up making all but 2 quest bosses pathetically easy.
  • Changes to leveling up prayer have made all of the bosses from earlier quests this. The prayer skill has some mid level prayers which grant complete immunity to attacks, but only one style at a time. At first, prayer was tough to level, but now, it's become easier, such that Protect prayers are standard among lower-mid-level players. Since most monsters in older content used only one attack style, they can't even scratch a player. Special mention goes to Nezikchened and Tarn Razorlor, both of whom drain prayer to make up for only using melee. A single dose of Prayer Potion, which can be bought easily, will fix this. Nowadays, any boss, and many of the Mooks you fight on the way to them, will either ignore your prayer completely or use multiple attack styles.
  • Ever since Evolution of Combat came out, all but the strongest of bosses from before it are now painfully easy, as the player can simply spam special attacks at them until they die.
  • RuneScape's most infamous example is the Mother Mallum, the Big Bad of the Temple Knight quest series. The series is heavily inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft and the Mother herself is based on his monstrosities, so nearly everyone expected an extremely difficult fight. Instead, she turns out to be a Puzzle Boss whom the player doesn't even fight; she takes control of you and control shifts to three supporting characters (the only time in the main game this happens, actually) who use tricks to take her down, by squishing her under a conveniently placed pillar. Word of God says this was done to create a quest series that could be completed in its entirety by mid-level players; players overwhelmingly felt this goal was not worth foregoing a cool boss fight. The backlash was strong enough that Jagex has seriously considered doing a rework of the quest.
  • Played for Laughs with the fight against the zombie Jed. Jed is a villainous slaver who had been causing trouble for the player for some time before he finally got killed in a cutscene, but then he comes back again as a zombie and the player must kill him for the final time. When the fight starts, a big health bar appears at the top of the screen, which is something that normally only happens for the toughest bosses in the game, and the dialogue builds it up as an epic final confrontation, but he has so little health that he dies in one hit.
• The Sith Emperor in the Jedi Knight's quest of Star Wars: The Old Republic becomes this as soon as you know two tricks — one, solve the puzzle to get a good set of gear for your little astromech. Two, when he splits himself into multiple copies, hit the only one that takes damage. But the Knight is really only Fighting a Shadow — the Emperor's public avatar. The real Emperor is immortal and unkillable so that the writers keep him on hand for future story arcs.
• In Toontown Online, the Chief Justice battle isn't even a battle. All it is is you and your friends trying to win a case in court!
• Ragnaros is actually a lot easier than several other bosses fought within the same dungeon in World of Warcraft. Really, Ragnaros is just....damage-the-snot out of him. Easier said than done, but he's still quite easy considering he's the lord of all fire elementals and created a volcano just by being summoned.
  • Plenty of bosses became this over time when people begun to get used to them and could know the strategies. And in the case of Wrath, all had epic gear from raids being more accessible so they could destroy the bosses very easily.
  • One of the bosses in the Brawler's Guild is Razorgrin, a mighty Threatening Shark bearing the title of "Terror of the High Seas". Sounds fearsome, until you realize you are fighting the shark on land. The poor thing can only move by slowly flopping about. The fight is basically a joke for ranged characters. Meleers, however, have a harder time of it since they need to fight Razorgrin while being dangerously close to its jaws, which can shred through the heaviest armor like paper in a single bite. Until Blizzard patched the shark to be attackable from behind without fear of getting bitten, Razorgrin was an Anti-Climax Boss for ranged characters yet That One Boss for meleers!
  • The Final Boss of Cataclysm, Deathwing, initially proves quite the challenge, with players on his back trying to pull off pieces of his armor so he can be blasted with an Artifact of Doom. The battle afterwards, where he's fallen into the ocean and making his Last Villain Stand, is much easier, and is especially disappointing by never serving up grand finale editions of the classic "dragon mechanics"^note breath weapon cone, tail swipes, and an air phase!, given that he is supposedly the most devastating dragon in multiple worlds. His son Nefarian pretty easily retains the title of "most infamous dragon final boss".
  • In Antorus the Burning Throne, final raid of Legion, the Coven of Shivarra is generally considered the hardest fight. This especially stands out when one considers that lore-wise the following two bosses are literal physical gods.

Mecha Games

• Another Century's Episode 2 has Bodolza as the last boss, who positively towers over your mech. To face him, you must hit the entry gate once to initiate a Cut Scene where your squad shoots him to death. Somewhat offset by the last stage being extremely hard: three long segments with no health refills whatsoever. Plus, the cinematic is reminiscent of the final battle in Macross: Do You Remember Love?, where Hikaru completely annihilates Bodolza.

Platformers

• In The Adventures of Lomax, Evil Ed. All you have to do is to keep spinning around and throwing rocks at him while avoiding occasional bombs. The only thing Ed does is making boulders and bombs appear on the stage. During the first part, he just stands on a floating rock and does nothing while boulders keep coming from left and right. It's made even more ridiculous when you notice that during the second part of the fight, he uses hand puppets.
• The final boss of The Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation is "Death Mwauthzyx", the giant monster featured in the AVGN movie. For a being presented as all-powerful in the film, he's an underwhelming final challenge with very predictable attacks and who spawns lots of mini-clones that can be milked for energy-restoring beers. The final boss of the previous game, Fred Fucks, was several times harder despite being a mere human.

• B3313: The final Bowser battle, coming after the grueling Randomizer Realm, is significantly easier than even the final Bowser battle from the original Super Mario 64. The bombs you have to toss Bowser into are very close to the battlefield, some even right on it, so you will not have to throw him too far, and the battlefield is big and wide enough to give you easy room to avoid his attacks.
• Parodied in the intentionally crappy mini-game "Hero Klungo Saves Teh World" in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: The boss of the mini-game is Grunty drawn in craptacular 2D, who does nothing but spit a single fireball at you. Jump over it and she dies for no apparent reason.
• The Final "Boss" of the arcade version of Bionic Commando (1987) is an unarmed general weaker than the generic Mook fought through the game.
• SEGA Saturn platformer Bug Too! has three stoned caterpillars for a final boss. Yes, really.

• Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back: Hands up if you defeated Dr. Neo Cortex on the first try. It's really easy since you only need to keep up with him and spin him thrice, and the only thing that can prevent you from doing so is the controls of the jetpack. It does not help that the boss before, N. Gin, is qualified as That One Boss by many.
• In Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, the Secret Sentinel can be wiped out in something like 20 seconds.

• Donkey Kong:
  • The True Final Boss of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest against Captain K. Rool at the end of the Lost World is considered easier than the normal final boss fight against him. While not a cakewalk by any means, Lost World K. Rool's firing patterns are relatively predictable, he'll frequently shoot a gas to reverse your controls (which isn't that hard to adapt to), and it only takes one hit to defeat him. Considering how hard the Brutal Bonus Levels you have go through to reach him are, it's thought of as a bit of a letdown. It doesn't help that the Golden Ending following the fight raises a number of glaringly dark implications.
  • The final boss of Donkey Kong Country Returns, Tiki Tong. The stages leading up to him are Nintendo Hard, at times bordering on Platform Hell, but the fight itself is shorter and easier than most of the other boss fights throughout the game; he dies after seven hits (a tougher, earlier boss takes nine), all of his attacks are glaringly telegraphed, and all but one are extremely easy to avoid. In addition, a couple of his moves actually involve dropping a health-restoring item onto the arena (they're meant to trick you into getting hurt, but it's fairly easy to nab the item and dodge the hit). If you do lose a life, you're not given the chance to get Diddy Kong back, meaning your health is shot in half, but if you made it that far in this challenging game in the first place, it really shouldn't hold you back. In fact, getting to him is harder than beating him, since you have to pilot a barrel rocket up the face of the tower and have to avoid spikes, moving gears, and columns that come in on both sides that will kill you instantly.

• Bob the Goldfish in Earthworm Jim is a Zero-Effort Boss, but he is a goldfish in a bowl, so that's excusable. However, the Final Boss of the game, Queen Slug-For-A-Butt, is almost equally pathetic. She does have an attack — summoning insects with her scepter to attack Jim — but the casting animation is long, and attacking her in the middle of it interrupts her. If you shoot the Queen at any time you can, it is not particularly hard to keep her locked down completely, killing her without even letting her fire off one attack.

• Astaroth in Ghosts 'n Goblins is extremely easy to defeat, as long as you have the shield equipped (otherwise, he can't be fought). All he does is shuffle predictably back and forth, occasionally shooting a slow-moving fireball. If that wasn't enough, the game also locks you into facing his direction, so you can keep up a barrage of shields while jumping backward. You'll probably have less trouble with him than some of the game's many Demonic Spiders, even considering the fact that you need to use the game's worst weapon to beat him.
  • Sardius in Super Ghouls and Ghosts is a cakewalk, all you have to do is stand under one of his legs and get the timing of the spawning platforms vs. his scatter beam attack right and you'll never get hit. The real challenge comes just before this battle, where you have to take on Astaroth and Neboroth with the Goddess bracelet.

• In A Hat in Time, the finale of Alpine Skyline doesn't even have a proper boss fight like the other chapters, but rather, a Level in Boss Clothing where you have to kill the three main purple flowers instead. Each of the flowers goes down in just four hits without much effort, and the only real challenge is getting to the flowers through some new obstacles. Despite the Foreshadowing building up to the finale as you collect the Time Pieces, the origin of the flowers is never explained beyond that, and the NPCs are just simply relieved that they're gone at the end.
• The endboss of Hero Core's Annihilation mode is ridiculously easy compared to the kind of stuff you have to put up with on Hard. Granted, you are fighting it at level 0, but you'd think it would be a slightly more difficult endboss, or one that made Hard seem easy.

• Though not the final boss, Annihilator Iosa from Iji is surprisingly easy for someone who, in the backstory, survived a shot from a weapon that annihilated an entire planet. You find out that the planet-stopping invulnerability is just a puzzle mechanic. She has the same shielding that all doors have that make them utterly invincible to weapons fire... but still open to being kicked. She can only fire horizontally, and there are platforms conveniently located above her head that allow you to dodge her weapons and fire down lasers onto her.
• I Wanna Be the Guy: Sort of. After a grueling battle in which Dracula throws pillars of fire, flames, unkillable blobs, the freaking Moon, and Delicious Fruit at you, he claims that he's tapping into an even more powerful form. Cue transformation into a Waddle Doo that dies in a single shot.

• Kirby:
  • Kirby Super Star: Marx may be the final boss, but despite his cunning plan to trick Kirby into giving him ultimate power, he's really not hard to beat. He's a big target and easy to hit despite teleporting around, and although his attacks hit hard, they're mostly telegraphed to the point of being quite easy to avoid — some, like his cutter and Wave-Motion Gun attacks, will probably hit you once on a first playthrough and rarely ever again, and his ultimate black hole attack can be dodged by just running in one direction or using the Stone ability. Speaking of, when fought in Milky Way Wishes, the Copy Essences Deluxe give you access to any ability you've found whenever you want, letting you use the Game-Breaker abilities like Hammer, Stone, and Plasma as much as you want without fear of losing them. Marx Soul, the superboss of the DS remake, steps up the challenge somewhat with new and faster attacks, but still isn't as hard as some of the earlier True Arena bosses, especially Galacta Knight.
  • Kirby: Squeak Squad. Upon defeating the penultimate boss and swiping its weapon, the game has you follow a small purple star throughout a rocky landscape, deep through outer space. At the end of the trail, the purple star goes One-Winged Angel into a much larger purple star with a pink serpentine eye, named in the ending as Dark Nebula. However, it's easier than almost every boss before it, having extremely predictable and easily avoided attacks and a low amount of HP. Even if you somehow manage to lose the Triple Star ability before you reach it, beating it with no ability at all is a simple task.
  • In Kirby Super Star Ultra's "Revenge of the King" mode, you make your way to the arena, fighting Phan Phan and Twin Fire Lions along the way. But right before you get to the arena, you're attacked by... (cue suspenseful music)... A WADDLE DEE IN A BANDANNA! All it does is walk around aimlessly. Plus, you can inhale him from the start of the battle just to save time.
  • In Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, the Perfect Run Final Boss, Zero Two, is considerably easier than most of the other bosses in the game, but especially stands out when compared to the normal Final Boss, Miracle Matter.
  • Kirby and the Rainbow Curse has Dark Crafter. He rivals Dark Nebula as the most disappointing of Kirby final bosses. His only real attack is throwing bombs. He is especially easy compared to Drawcia Soul.
  • There's also Morpho Knight in Kirby Star Allies. Despite the massive lore surrounding it and its surprise appearance as the Final Boss of the Guest Star mode, your fully maxed out attack power, speed, and health will make the battle against it a complete curb-stomp, considering that it basically fights the same way as Meta Knight but with slow sword-slashing attacks in place of being able to duplicate itself. The game's final update would make up for this by giving Morpho Knight an EX form, which is far more deadly than the original form.

• The spider in Limbo, being as it's the only recurring enemy in the game, qualifies: its legs are razor-sharp, can (and will) impale you in a single strike, and it can follow you anywhere. However, the last time you encounter it, it's taken so much punishment that it only has one leg left, which attacks once and then gets stuck.
• LittleBigPlanet:
  • The Collector in LBP1 is actually rather easy to beat, possibly to make up for the Bunker...
  • The final Titan in LBP3 is pretty easy if you are even only semi-decent at the game.

• Mega Man X:
  • Mega Man X3 has Dr. Doppler. He was set up as the original Big Bad of the game (before Sigma ended up being behind it all) and is the boss of the third fortress stage, which is also the Boss Rush stage. Doppler himself has three moves, one of which isn't even an actual attack and the other two of which are extremely easy to dodge. He even has a weakness to the Acid Burst, which can do up to five units of damage to him when fully charged.
  • In Mega Man X6, the final boss, Sigma, is significantly easier than the rest of the game. His first form is a complete joke, almost to the point of being a Zero-Effort Boss even if you don't use his weakness, as he just lumbers around the room and fires off attacks which barely even scratch you. His second form is somewhat more challenging, as his attacks can do serious damage if they connect, but he follows a predictable pattern and there are several safe spots in the room, meaning it's still quite manageable; the green blob-heads that he spawns can sometimes drop life energy (and even 1-ups!) if they're destroyed. Zero especially will have a good time attacking him with Guard Shell-enhanced normal saber attacks or Ensuizan.
• In Mega Man Zero, Harpuia appears to be intimidating as a general, but he has a very infamous chink in his attack pattern you can exploit to make him all but helpless. Switch to the Ice Chip, charge up the Z-Saber, leap over his two sword slashes with a jump dash and then leap over him once he tries to pull a third, nail him from behind with the Z-Saber, and he gets knocked back and frozen by the charged ice attack, which plays against his elemental weakness. It also resets his pre-programmed pattern and makes him repeat his sword slashes over and over each time he gets struck by the fully-charged ice attacks. Rinse and repeat, he's done. If he can use his EX Skill because you're at S or A-rank, that adds in a little unpredictability. Unfortunately, this is all but killed in the next game installment: Harpuia becomes FAR deadlier, now zipping around too fast to lock into a cycle, and given new moves that force you to back away and rely on long-range weapons like the Buster Shot Gun or Shield Boomerang. Worse, he's flat-out lethal if he uses his new EX Skill, where he resorts to a Beam Spam hellstorm around half health that can rape you dead in seconds — one you'd have to be insanely lucky to dodge unscathed each time he uses it.
• Mega Man Zero 2:
  • The game has Elpizo. This game one-ups its predecessor in Nintendo Hard, but Elipzo averts it entirely. After what is quite possibly one of the hardest Boss Rush stages in any Mega Man game (which they totally cheat in by replacing one of the bosses with a new two-against-one situation with a fresh set of attacks on tap), Elipzo shows up and is an absolute pushover. His first form can be beaten easily as long as you avoid the six-orb drain attack, which he telegraphs and is relatively easy to dodge. His second form is even easier. He's a huge floating target with only one attack that is actually somewhat hard to dodge. The rest of his attacks are pathetically simple, another isn't so much an attack as much as giving you a platform to jump on and take a free shot at him, and one can even be stopped by slashing the orbs. The only truly nerve-racking part of this final stage in the game was the spike pit nightmare you have to traverse just to reach him. Harpuia was actually more threatening in his normal form than the final boss ever was, because the Beam Spam he keeps pulling mid-fight is a real mean bitch to constantly and very barely dodge in such a confined space, while in the final battle, it's just a cheap throwaway boss that made use of a room too big for the fight to get truly interesting (though for Scenery Porn and plot-related reasons).
  • The way Copy X reduced the solid ground below him to a puny block right before assuming seraph form — which he could incinerate (a literal case of "don't touch the floor, it's hot lava"), forcing you to leap onto the spike-tipped shields hovering around him and cling to them for dear life. He even had a restraining energy halo spam attack and a deadly EX Skill variant of the move that could paralyze you mid-air and cause you to plummet into the abyss below without having a chance to break free in time and land safely by angling your fall to the one safe platform left. Elpizo's boss fight amounted to using a room with too much empty space for rent — you could literally pound away at his health from the safety of a corner. However, the third game polished the boss fights with the final boss Omega Zero, who is fast enough to keep up with you no matter how hard you try to outrun him, and his attacks leave nowhere to hide instead of slowly hitting a minimum of the room, dashing any hope of retreating from him. The fourth game's final boss gives you only 2 minutes to win, leaving you with no room to resort to cheap tricks,
• Mega Man Zero 3:
  • The game pulls this with Omega due to Gameboy Advance limitations. Omega was meant to be an agile, threatening giant instead of a lumbering pushover in his first form, which served as the intro boss. After he absorbs the Dark Elf, he turns gold and the only things different from the first battle are faster attacks that are still painfully easy to dodge and he now makes use of his huge broadsword, which, too, was meant to do more than just stabbity-stab. Then Omega kicks it into high gear and transforms into a giant armored warrior with some dangerous moves at his disposal, but he's still fairly predictable and easy to beat. But then he sheds the armored bulk and reveals himself as your counterpart, a badass Lightning Bruiser who can tear you to pieces if you drop your guard at the wrong time or choose to face him head on instead of a distance, which strips you of the reaction you now need to avoid getting pummeled by his move repertoire.
  • The Secret Boss Hidden Phantom as well, through seen by many as the hardest boss in the game, since that battle takes place in Cyberspace, you will have the abilities of all the Fusion Elves, meaning two health bars, secret Z-Saber moves, plus two extra Sub Tanks, making this less of a challenge than what it is supposed to be.
• Mega Man ZX:
  • The original brings back Omega as a Secret Boss... on steroids. He's actually so tough, he dwarfs the difficulty of Serpent in retrospect — although when you crank up the difficulty all the way, you can go ahead and consider Serpent a real threat all his own.
  • Advent has the fight against Vent or Aile as Mega Man ZX. This should be one of the toughest challenges in Ashe or Grey's journey - the previous protagonist, who was amazing enough to take on Serpent after absorbing the power of a Model W, and has had three more years to get tougher. And granted, on the ground, Model ZX is nigh unstoppable, with unpredictable attacks that are barely telegraphed aided by incredible speed and a strong three-hit saber combo. The combo in particular can absolutely shred Ashe or Grey. So if Model ZX is so powerful, why is this an Anti-Climax? The fight takes place in an underground quarry, with walls on both sides of the arena. If you stay on the ground, Model ZX will rip you apart. Simply climbing the walls, however, reduces the fight to an utter joke, as the majority of Model ZX's attacks don't reach you. Model ZX will spazz about on the floor, trying and failing to hit you, and you can simply wait for the three-hit combo to jump down, fill Model ZX with lead, and then jump back up again. It gets even better if Model ZX tries the one attack that can hit you, since they'll try to climb the wall and slooooowly slide down it, trying to shoot you with the buster. You can easily get off three charge shots on ZX, or spam Model H's air slash, or bash Model ZX with Model L, or even find a use for Rospark's upward shots. If this is your first time playing, Model ZX will likely be the first boss you fight you don't take any damage on.
• Mega Man (Classic) has a lot of these.
  • Mega Man's final boss, the Wily Machine, is noticeably easier than both the other Wily bosses (especially the Yellow Devil) and the Boss Rush beforehand. The first phase goes down in a few hits from Fire Storm, and the second can be beaten with Rolling Cutter or Thunder Beam. Neither of them have attacks that are particularly hard to dodge.
  • The Alien from Mega Man 2 has the element of surprise on its side, but all it does is move around the room in a figure-eight pattern and fire occasional bullets at you. While it can only be harmed by Bubble Lead, the weapon has enough ammo that you likely won't run out, and it's easy to hit with it in the center of the room.
  • The final boss of Ultimate Mega Man is 2's Wily Machine but with easily avoidable attacks and only one form.
  • Mega Man 3:
    • The final battle with Proto Man as Break Man, despite him having harried you for the entire game, his new sprite and name, him being treated in-story as Mega Man's equal, and coming right after the notoriously unbalanced Doc Robot fights, is a joke. His attack pattern is basically no different from the prior fights with him and consists of little more than hopping around the room firing easy-to-dodge and low-damage shots with no regard for Mega Man's position. He may lack a weakness and only take damage from the Mega Buster, but as he has almost nothing in the way of Mercy Invincibility, hopping behind him and rapid-firing will deplete him in seconds before he teleports away to end the fight. By some accounts, this was a case of rushed development, and he was going to have a moveset to fit Mega Man's rival and equal (there's even Dummied Out sprites for some of them), but this was scrapped.
    • Gamma, the final boss, doesn't have any attacks that are really hard to dodge (though he can still punch you for an instant kill), a few hits from Hard Knuckle beats his first form, and then one from Top Spin or a few hits from Search Snake are all it takes to finish him off.
  • Mega Man 4's fight against Dr. Cossack. His attack pattern is easy to decipher, Dust Crusher will destroy his Cossack Catcher fairly quickly, and you can reset his AI by sliding.
  • Mega Man 5's Wily Capsule is more annoying than difficult. It sticks to a single attack pattern that's not that hard to dodge, and likes to waste your time by appearing outside of the range of the Mega Buster. It's not that tough as is, but Beat reduces the fight to a complete joke.
  • Mega Man 6's Wily Machine may be a three-stage fight, but none of them are particularly hard to beat. The first and second forms just slowly stomp around and fire projectiles at intervals, while the Wily Capsule is even weaker than the one in Mega Man 5, only firing a radial spread of 4 Roboteching energy balls. All of them share the same weapon weakness to the Silver Tomahawk, but even if it runs out of ammo, defeating the remaining forms is a simple task.
  • In the games for the Game Boy, you get to face off against a "Mega Man Killer" before the Wily Stage. These opponents usually have no weaknesses to anything but your default Mega Buster, and are nearly as hard as Wily himself. The big exception to this is Mega Man II, which gives us Quint, a modified future version of Mega Man himself, who spends the battle slowly hopping around the arena on the Sakugarne, a jackhammer/pogo stick device which does a whopping three points of damage if it hits you. Not only is he very easy to take down with the Mega Buster, but Hard Man's weapon will finish him off in five hits.
  • Mega Man V's battle against Terra is particularly infamous for being so anti-climatic. Right from the game's intro, he's treated as a huge threat, as he's The Leader of the Stardroids, he No Sells fully charged Mega Buster shots, and Dark Moon, what would normally be a fortress stage boss in a typical Mega Man, is simply just another disposable lackey to him. After beating all of the Stardroids, you finally get to confront him as he vows to avenge his fallen comrades... and then he not only is suddenly vulnerable to the Mega Buster, but also is weak to Deep Digger. An extraterrestrial conqueror that is hell-bent on taking over Earth through terrorism explodes into shrapnel after having five rocks thrown in his face. And after that, Hijacked by Ganon kicks in yet again, as the Wily Star slowly comes into view on the horizon...
• Metroid:
  • In Super Metroid, Mother Brain has absurdly predictable attacks. Occasionally, you can get unlucky and die when it's supposed to just drain your life down to a certain point in preparation for a cutscene, but normally it's almost impossible to lose to this boss; even if you have to fall back to charged shots, it gets to its second phase pretty quick, and once the titular Metroid revives you and you get the Hyper Beam, it's almost a joke. If you grabbed the majority of the missile/super missile expansions you can nearly beat her without looking at the screen, just hold the shoulder button to aim Samus' arm cannon upwards and bang on the fire button. However, it's more for the story than the gameplay at this point, so it's still tense.
  • The Omega Metroid in Metroid Fusion as well. It can certainly kick your butt if you make too many mistakes, but it's still a lot easier than many of the previous bosses. It is simply a final challenge during the timed escape after the real final boss, the SA-X.
  • The titular final boss of Metroid Prime isn't too difficult once you figure out its weaknesses to your weapons, info that the game itself gives you simply by using your scan visor. It's an absolute cakewalk compared to the prior boss Mecha-Ridley, which is one of the hardest boss fights in any video game.
  • The final boss of Metroid: Other M. Shortly after the battle against the Metroid Queen, you confront MB, the cybernetic reincarnation of Mother Brain. How do you defeat her? Aim a charged shot at her, which prompts a cutscene where another character tries to deescalate the situation, only for Federation soldiers to kill MB. The fight is also something of a Guide Dang It!, as the game throws waves upon waves of enemies at the player that many thought you had to take out in order to get to a second phase, only to accidentally drift their cursor over MB.
• The final "boss," so to speak, in Mirror's Edge (insofar as the game can have bosses). After the Climax Boss Fight against the assassin in level 7, one might be expecting the game to end on a similar note in level 9, the finale... but you take out Jackknife by jumping at his helicopter, much like you did at the end of the prologue. Faith grabs the bar and swings into the helicopter, propelling her feet squarely into Jackknife's chest, sending him flying out of the helicopter and plummeting to his doom. If you're fast enough, he won't even get a shot off. Given the fact that boss fights don't really fit the tone of the game (the assassin fight is an argument for Unexpected Gameplay Change), it was good idea.

• Prince of Persia:
  • The final "boss" of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time merely creates a couple of clones of himself, which put up no more resistance than a standard enemy, and is then rendered defenseless and can be killed with a single attack.
  • Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones has an anticlimax boss as well. After defeating the Vizier once and for all, the Dark Prince tries to take you over. However, this basically amounts to little more than some more platform jumping inside the Prince's mind (in which it's impossible to die) while he and the Dark Prince trade arguments, and getting to attack the Dark Prince every once in a while while he does nothing to fight back. Finally, you get to a big room with the Dark Prince where once again, he does nothing to fight back (except multiplying every time you hit him). The only way to win is to just ignore him and go up the nearby staircase, while the Dark Prince practically begs you to come back and keep fighting.
  • In Prince of Persia: when you confront your shadow, you're prompted to fight... but any damage you deal you also receive, and if he dies, so do you. As it turns out, the thing to do is simply to put away your sword — if you don't fight, neither does he. As for the vizier himself, while no particular weakling, he is no stronger than the rest of the enemies you've fought, and is just as vulnerable to the Spartan-approved tactic of knocking him down a giant pit.
  • This doesn't happen in the SNES version, where the Vizier begins the fight by casting spells at you, and once enough damage is dealt, reveals himself to be a highly skilled, if not annoying swordsman. No pits, although you can pin him against the edge of the screen.
  • In the Classic remake, Jaffar is armed with a deadly magic staff, and there's no pit either.
  • In the Nintendo DS game Prince of Persia: The Fallen King, the final boss has three attack patterns, two of which were used by bosses of previous stages. Which means that, once you figure out the third, you can defeat him inside of thirty seconds.
• The final boss of Psychonauts is slightly anticlimactic. It consists entirely of running away from the final boss and waiting for your 11th-Hour Superpower gauge to refill. The abomination is invulnerable to your normal attacks, but the instant the slowly-but-constantly-filling gauge hits max, you get to turn around and watch the boss cringe and try feebly to block your attacks as you beat the living hell out of him.

• The final boss of Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando can be an example unless you're under-levelled, and if you have the RYNO2 it's basically a matter of holding down the fire button. It's actually possible to kill him without so much as setting foot in the arena. (See here.)
• The final boss fight in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. While the fight right before (fought on foot) with Dr. Nefarious is fairly difficult and requires pretty good dodging, the second and final fight with his super weapon turned into a Humongous Mecha can be won by just circling the boss and holding down the fire button. Because you're in a vehicle at the time, running out of ammo is a non-issue, and the boss's attacks all boil down to "shoot a bunch of missiles that probably won't hit if you're moving".
• After a grueling four-part Sequential Boss battle against Reflux, the last enemy pitted against you in Rayman 3 is André, who can do nothing but beg for mercy until you use a special technique to remove The Corruption from him.

• Shotgun Ninja: The final boss rides a grenade-spamming Mini-Mecha. Except, if you have some grenades left (and you most likely do), you can simply stay above him and toss down a couple of them, which is enough to kill him.
• Le Paradox from Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. For someone who has built up since the beginning of the game, all the boss fight amounts to is a bunch of quick time events that give the player too much time for button presses and a few very easy platforming sections. What makes this an even bigger let down is that the previous level is easily among the best in the game and the previous boss fight with Ms. Decibel was a bigger challenge than this one.
• In Sly Spy, the Final Boss has no attacks other than trapping you with a Descending Ceiling behind a destructible force field. (His Evil Laugh doesn't count as an attack.) After breaking through the barrier, you can take him down in one hit.
• Ballser in Something, mostly because he is a spriteswap of the noob boss sprite. His patterns are easy to predict as a result.
• In Sonic Adventure, the Chaos 6 boss battle in Big's story can be beaten in under 10 seconds. It's also Big's only boss.
  • Perfect Chaos himself is not very hard at all and is the final boss of the entire game. To wit: you cannot actually be damaged in this fight, simply be blown backwards (Super Sonic is invincible, after all). Your enemy is your ring counter (much like it was in the Doomsday Zone of Sonic 3 & Knuckles), which will plunge you into the water when it expires. You collect rings along the way and the objective of the fight is to reach Perfect Chaos as fast as possible while dodging his attacks, so you're encouraged not to shuffle your feet anyway. You damage Perfect Chaos simply by running into him at top speed.
  • In Sonic and Knuckles, near the end of Sonic's game, you finally get the chance to fight Knuckles — who's been a thorn in your side in the cutscenes since the beginning of Sonic 3 — and it's trivially easy to beat him without getting hit once. Then there's the final boss in a normal playthrough of Sonic 3 (without the Lock On), Big Arm: It isn't necessarily easy, per se, but compared to other 16-bit Sonic games, it definitely doesn't feel like final boss material.
  • The 3DS version of Generations brought Big Arm back, but as the first boss, so it was given a ridiculously predictable pattern and easily dodgeable attacks. The whole boss fight can be ended in under 30 seconds, and even less if you come back to the boss after unlocking the homing attack.
  • The original 16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog had a fairly easy final boss, too. One of its attacks is an instant kill even with rings, as it crushes you, but this attack is telegraphed with enough time to get out of the way. Its other attack is...four extremely slow-moving projectiles. That's it. Even without rings, it would be extremely easy.
  • The final boss of Sonic the Hedgehog CD, the Psycho-Egg, is just Eggman in his normal vehicle with four panels that flip around and whatnot, and it's a case of dodging predictable attacks and waiting for a chance to hit him, or just taking the hit and then damaging him using invincibility frames. It's not overly hard or very exciting, especially compared to the final bosses of Sonic 2 or 3&K. It's made worse by the fact that the epic race with Metal Sonic comes before the final boss.
  • Sonic Advance 2 has surprisingly rough boss battles throughout the entire game, mostly because they're all of the "Get Back Here!" Boss variety. The exception is the final boss, which is completely stationary and a complete joke as a result. The Boss Rush to get to the final boss is actually harder. The True Final Boss is more challenging, though.
• The master brain in Space Station Silicon Valley, who, after much ado, is introduced as... Well, exactly what it sounds like: A brain in a jar. The main character, at that point a killer robot with Eye Beams, uses about two seconds to flash-fry him.
• The "final" boss in Spoiler Alert. He dies in one hit (other bosses take three or more hits to kill).
• Despite being the Final Boss of SpongeBob SquarePants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman, the Flying Dutchman is a complete pushover. Many of his attacks are easily avoidable, and he goes down in a couple hits from his own bombs.
• Gnasty Gnorc from the original Spyro the Dragon (1998). He takes two hits, and spends three quarters of the battle running away from you.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The original Super Mario Bros. has this, making this trope as old as the NES (obviously). You can kill Bowser with fireballs if you're equipped with a Fire Flower, but all you need to do to beat him is grab the axe behind him and watch as he falls into the lava pit below. He is almost impossible to lose to if you make it to him with even a normal mushroom. Just charge in, take a hit, and get to the axe. Only Normal (small) Mario has to use any strategy at all, and even then it's usually down to one well-timed jump. Also of note is that this applies to all eight encounters against him in the game, as well as all twelve encounters in The Lost Levels.
  • Super Mario Bros. 3's final boss is in comparison much easier than all the other bosses (except for dumb Boom Boom and the flying form is actually harder!) because he suicides himself with butt smashes. You can also exploit the fact that you can touch Bowser's lower part of the body and not take damage. If you're in Super form, just crouch. In other words, you just have to wait until when you have to dodge on the very moment Bowser slams through the final layer of the floor and falls to his doom. Remakes of the game patch out this trick, though, so Bowser is less of a pushover there.
  • Corona Mountain, the final level of Super Mario Sunshine, can bring gamers to tears, particularly the section where you have to navigate the volcano's interior on a shaky mudboat by squirting water at specific angles. However, if you can make it to Bowser, the final boss fight is a piece of cake; all you have to do is Ground Pound the platforms around his hot tub (which is very easy once you learn his pattern, which isn't overly difficult to do) and he's finished.
  • Compared to the other Bowser fights in the New Super Mario Bros. sub-series, the one in New Super Mario Bros. 2 is very easy. It consists of Bowser (in giant form) attacking Mario with fireballs from the background while Mario hops from platform to platform in a vertical auto-scrolling sequence, which is less demanding than the father-and-son Dual Boss in the DS and Wii U games and the horizontal escape sequence in the Wii version. And the True Final Boss battle (against Dry Bowser) is identical.
  • The final Bowser fight in Super Mario Galaxy 2 is somewhat difficult... at least for the first phase. After a big to-do about him reemerging from the fight even more powerful, the fight changes to a very gimmicky section of ground-pounding meteors at Bowser. He only has one attack and it releases a coin that negates any damage you take. This fight is especially sad due to the wonderful music that you might not even get through one listen of.
  • The final bosses in Mario Is Missing! and Mario's Time Machine (the NES versions). Both are supposed to be Bowser. The former is about half Mario's height, looks more like Wendy Koopa, and dies in seconds; the latter looks correct, but still dies in seconds. Their AI is even worse, because it doesn't exist. They just walk back and forth endlessly in a straight line and take damage when jumped on, in a game in which Mario/Luigi can neither get hurt nor die. It's as pathetic as it sounds, and probably explains why the other versions just didn't bother to have a final boss at the end of them.
  • The RoboBrood refight in Super Mario Odyssey is far easier than the original, due to the new setting and enemy captured to fight it. That's because in the second fight, not only are you on the Moon with low gravity (trivialising the Colossus Climb aspect of the fight in the process), but you're also controlling a Hammer Bro who can rapid fire shoot hammers (which will destroy the leg armour and expose the boss to damage in about 20 seconds). Still, it is found at the end of a Boss Rush, so perhaps it's meant to be an easy end to a gauntlet of potentially annoying battles.
• This trope is a plot point for Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Darth Vader was the final boss in The Empire Strikes Back and was quite challenging. In this game, Vader is fought before the Emperor and goes down very quickly. This shows how Luke has grown stronger between games when he completed his Jedi training.

• In the Super NES game, Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose, Dizzy Devil is defeated via a rather unique way; you have to feed him. That's it, when you feed him enough, the fight is over, and the level is cleared. Before anyone says, "this game is for kids, it should be easy", try playing the game — this game is not easy. Besides, all the other bosses in the game are handled the same way as most bosses, so there's really no excuse.
• In Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2, Boss Cass' last form is... Cass himself. Granted, cassowaries are the most dangerous birds on Earth, but you're using the game's most powerful mech. Beating the snot out of him is very satisfying.

• The true final boss for Wario Land II, once you've unlocked all of the treasures and golden panels, is the Giant Spear Man, a Recurring Boss who only needs to be jumped on a few times in order to be beaten.
• Wonder Boy in Monster World: Biomeka in the original Japanese version is a complete joke, being an immobile alien with no attacks other than summoning easily-destroyed laser blasters. The international version changed this by adding a conveyor belt and moving circular saw to the boss room... which inadvertently turned him into the opposite trope.

• Baby Bowser in Yoshi's Story isn't a particularly difficult final boss to begin with, but is made still easier by the fact that you're provided with a near infinite amount of fruit to recover your health with. There's even a Heart Fruit available, and taking him out before it wears off is a breeze thanks to the infinite eggs it grants you.

Puzzle Games

• Adventures of Lolo has the Great Devil/King Egger. He's a Cutscene Boss in the first game, getting casually turned into an egg and knocked into the horizon. In the second game, he's actually fightable, but he's not much harder; he spits out easily-dodged fireballs and is a huge target that moves predictably. Since your egg shots can block his projectiles and you have infinite ammo, you can kill him by just taping down the fire button and then leaving. The third game is the only one where he's even a little challenging, but even then, his fireballs remain both blockable and slow. He even has a Hopeless Boss Fight, but one that would still be pretty easy if he didn't have infinite health.
• Ketzal's Corridors has the fight with Korruptal. While the three stages before him are difficult and require you to have mastered the movement of the three main Guardians, Korruptal himself is a joke, essentially being a slightly harder version of the Tower of Training levels; just match the patterns on his body a few times with each Guardian, which can be done in under a minute, and he's done for. The level with him is also the only one in the game with checkpoints, so even if you do mess up a few times, you don't have to restart the entire battle.
• Puyo Puyo has a fair few in its otherwise challenging boss roster:
  • Masked Prince in Puyo Puyo 2 is faster and better at chaining than any other opponent, a worthy True Final Boss for the game. Masked Prince in Box's Scramble mode, on the other hand, is a downgrade from the four (potentially five) Yo~n-rule opponents that precede him, as they have special attacks and abilities while he uses Tsu rules and has nothing that they don't have.
  • The final match with Ecolo in Puyo Puyo 7 is also a complete joke and barely any more difficult than a match with a regular opponent. It's one of the few battles in the game's story mode to not take place in Transformation so he can't use that to survive, and his AI is unusually slow and bad at chaining. Combine this with being the second final boss to only use 4 colors in his battle (Doppelganger Arle of Yo~n being the first) when most final bosses up to that point used five, and he goes down almost embarrassingly easily.
• Bossmin, the Final Boss of Yosumin!. The final stained glass stage and penultimate fight against Goldmin are utterly brutal, the former requiring specifically matching 999 Redmin, and the latter requiring 4 board-wiping Yosumin sets (which can only be gotten either through sheer luck or careful and deliberate planning) and multiple Goldmin, which are somewhat scarce and can easily be removed from the board before you can get to them by the sudden appearance of a Bigmin or accidentally triggering a Badmin. By comparison, Bossmin is a cakewalk, only requiring, among a few relatively easy square sets and the usual stained glass collection, 999 of any Yosumin and 9 Badmin, which at this point in the game are guaranteed to appear one-at-a-time and you've likely been regularly triggering by accident.

Real-Time Strategy

• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun: Firestorm: The last mission Cabal deploys against you the gigantic Core Defender. Three times the hitpoints of the second-heaviest unit in the game, weapons so powerful they'll devastate any ground force, level buildings in two hits, and with a longer range than all fixed defenses. Surely it must be suitably defended from air attacks, right? Nope — scare up a few jumpjet infantry units and down the fearsome Defender goes. And if you don't even want to bother with that, just force-fire artillery on a bridge as it goes across — and watch it vanish in a splash.
• Dawn of War II: The Hive Tyrant Alpha in the campaign. Though powerful, in this mission the player has control of all six of their squads (whereas it is limited to four in all other missions) as well as Gabriel Angelos, and the poor thing manages to attack maybe three times before being killed. In contrast, the Optional Bosses, the Avatar of Khaine and Warboss Bonesmasha, are at least a magnitude more resilient, with the former in particular the single most difficult task in the game.
• Medieval II: Total War:
  • In the base game, the Mongols. Their armies of horse archers are terrifying in open field battles... but when you fight them in your cities or at a bridge, they just turn into fodder for your spearmen, archers and crossbows. As for the Timurids, well, winning in open battles is possible, but it requires locking down their archers. And cavalry. Lots and lots of cavalry.
  • In the Britannia expansion, if Scotland is losing ground then William Wallace might spawn with an impressive army of highlander units with units light years ahead of Scotland's production centres, great weapon and armour ratings and tons of experience. Except William fights as a general in a unit of Highland Nobles, foot infantry. So one well-timed cavalry charge, and...
  • Also in Britannia, King Haakon of Norway arrives with a huge army to oversee the conquest of Britain. While a strong general with a formidable force, he is also an old man and will likely die not long after he arrives.
• Pikmin 2: The Waterwraith After spending every preceding floor of the cavern it's encountered in as an invincible monstrosity relentlessly stalking the player, literally steamrolling over their armies of the titular creatures, and providing the series' most famous case of Nightmare Fuel, you reach the final floor. And there you find the Waterwraith's one weakness. And from that point, the boss is turned into such a joke that even the boss music changes to a more cheerful reprise as the creature starts to panic. As one would probably guess, the Curb-Stomp Battle is very satisfying after the aforementioned Nightmare fuel.
• StarCraft II: Nova Covert Ops: The final mission features two stages: the first has you take out a Humongous Mecha, the second has you go in the wreckage to face General Davis, who doesn't even have a weapon when you kill her. Particularly annoying about this is the But Thou Must! nature: Valerian wants her to face trial for her crimes (something the player is likely to want by that point), and killing her isn't even a cutscene.

Rhythm Games

• The Final Boss song of Cytus II's main storyline, " ͟͝͞Ⅱ́̕", only has a rating of 14 on Chaos difficulty. For comparison, "V.", the previous boss song, is a Chaos 15, the highest rating possible. Most of its difficulty also comes simply from its sheer length, rather than actually having a challenging note pattern, and no individual section would feel out place in a Chaos 13 or even 12 song.
• Groove Coaster has the Undertale collaboration, with two tracks in particular being well-known for being exclusive to the "No Mercy" route in the latter game (in which the player slaughters damn near every character in the game and the game goes out of its way to make the player feel horrible for it or frustrate them into a Rage Quit with obnoxiously hard bosses). Even on their hardest charts, they don't exactly deliver in the challenge department:
  • "Battle Against a True Hero" is known amongst fans for being the boss theme of the first legitimate challenge on a No Mercy run. In Groove Coaster, its most difficult chart is rated 9 out of 15 (charts in this game generally start being considered "boss" charts at level 12 or 13). Unlike "MEGALOVANIA" below, it doesn't even get an Extra chart. The instrumentation of the track gives off the feeling that it had the potential to be a very difficult track.
  • "MEGALOVANIA", of all tracks. Given the intensity of the track and the hefty context that it plays in in its source game (namely, an obnoxiously unfair fight with one of the Final Bosses, Sans the Skeleton, where victory means topping off the No Mercy run, destroying the world, and permanently tainting all future runs), the Hard chart is not terribly hard by the standards of "boss" tracks, only being rated a 10 with no unique gimmicks to speak of. A December 2018 update did give it an Extra chart rated 12, which is more of a challenge if only by a few notches.

Shoot 'em Ups

• The ending of After Burner Climax for the arcade which involves nukes also ends rather anticlimactically even if you let the nukes go off, as your Carrier's CWACs destroys the missile and takes only mild damage from the shrapnel. But the stage beforehand will make most AB players wonder how he can get past all the missiles and flak barrages.
• Cuphead: The Devil's final phase is literally just you shooting at the guy's face while he cries. His only real attack at this point is the flaming blue poker chip from the previous two phases falling on the last platform to stand on, which is very easy to dodge (technically, his Tears of Blood are damaging too, but they don't actually come close to hitting you). In fact, for some players, the Devil as a whole might count as this. He's only moderately harder than most earlier bosses, is easier than some, and he also doesn't send randomized minions after you whose attack patterns take longer to learn, like King Dice or Baroness Von Bon Bon.
• Almost every final boss in the Gradius series is the Bacterian emperor, who usually takes the form of a large brain and either fires easily-avoidable attacks or just sits there and does nothing, giving the player a chance to take him down. Exceptions to this pattern are in Nemesis II and Salamander II.
• While in the original Otomedius, the Gofer sisters' Odin Core is most definitely not an anti-climax, the final form of Dark Force in Otomedius Excellent is. After dealing with two difficult forms, the third one is just her child form, shrouded in a bit of black mist and shooting easily dodgeable projectiles.
• A self-parody series named Parodius also has these. Parodius Da has an octopus who claims he's "The strongest" (A reference to Gofer from Gradius II), but you can shoot his legs off or wait until they let go, much like the Xaerous Brain from the original Gradius. In its Omake level, you find a penguin waking up and sitting on a bomb. He takes out a sign out of Hammerspace that says "The End". You just ignite the bomb, watch him fly (and fall), and get the many bells that come out. The only final boss in this series that's actually difficult is Bug from Tako wa Chikyū o Sukū.
• The Final Boss in the last wave of Bravo Sector (the first episode) in Raptor: Call of the Shadows is unusually easy when compared to the bosses from the previous two waves. This eggshell-shaped capital ship that defends the oil rigs that you probably have already destroyed opens up with only large salvos of missiles and a few number of aimed flak balls at you, which are relatively easy to dodge. While it has two white guns that look like its damaging plasma cannons, for some reason, they don't even fire (presumably due to either a bug or being Dummied Out to not work in the game), which plays this trope straight.
• The Stage 7.2 Final Boss in R-Type Final 2 is laughably weak; just fire your Force Device into the core and fire away for about 15 seconds while dodging the slow-moving Wave Bydo. Yes, even on R-Typer 3 difficulty. The Lord at the End of Dimension in Final 3 Evolved isn't much better either. All it does is send some junk after you, only coming out of a wall and changing shapes periodically, rinse and repeat.
• While far from a pushover, the Final Boss battle with Andross in Star Fox 64 is easier than most of the other bosses in the second half of the game. He's easy on either of the paths: the final stage of the easier one stays in corridor mode, making its attack tough to dodge, but can be killed literally by mashing the fire button as fast as possible (and one bomb or two), whereas the harder path does up the conditions of the general battle, but essentially has no attacks once you destroy his eyes, meaning that as long as you know how to outmaneuver him, he's basically a sitting duck. ^ExplanationAndross' Brain is faced in All Range Mode, and he's fast (as fast as your Arwing while boosting, in fact), and can only be hurt by shooting a small greenish spot on the side of his brain, but if he loses his eyes, you can only be damaged by ramming into him or the easily dodged mines he leaves, or getting caught into his tentacles, which will damage you badly, but that only happens if you carelessly fly low towards him. In other words, the most dangerous element of this fight is the player's own hubris coming to bite them in the ass.
• You can easily take out Joe Fang in the first two Virtua Cop games by firing your gun rapidly against him. He has a huge hit box in his helicopter in the first game and he goes down extremely fast in a jet pack in the second game.
• In Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair, the Final Boss's first phase is a legitimate challenge, with the dragon's hard-to-dodge One-Hit Kill fire breath and the rider's tornado spells, but his One-Winged Angel phase is pathetic, as his only attack aside from Collision Damage is a barrage of sword-cast lightning bolts than can easily be dodged due to the flashes indicating where they'll strike next. They also don't kill in one hit, unlike most projectiles. The only reason he is still a threat is that you only have one credit to beat him, and the first phase will have softened most players up.

Simulation Games

• Every single Ghost Recon game has this, with most final boss fights being a regular guy surrounded by bodyguards who all go down in one hit, but including anything else would be counter to the game's ultra-tactical and realistic gameplay.
• Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. can be said to have an anticlimatic final mission by gameplay terms. Operation Twilight was no more intense then your bog standard dogfight and your opponents fights not in state of the art fighters but older Migs. No superweapon or Ace Squadron to make the last stand against you or anything.
• Gabriel, the villain of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 1 & 2, gives you an overly long Motive Rant, then tries to quick-draw his handgun on you. It migh have worked if your character didn't already have his gun pointed at his head.
• In Rune Factory 2, your character is challenged to a duel by the father of one of the available love interests, in order to convince said father that you're "man enough" to marry his girl. Before the fight begins, a giant orc appears and interrupts the fight, threatening both you and the father. The orc is quickly found to be a pushover, as despite its girth and height, it is no stronger or more durable than its smaller, more common brethren.
• The Final Boss of Trauma Team, Twisted Rosalia, is ridiculously easy and repetitive to treat by the standards of the Nintendo Hard series by Atlus, though this is justified somewhat in that Twisted Rosalia, unlike the other Final Bosses in the series, is not an artificially created bioweapon.

Stealth-Based Games

• Assassin's Creed:
  • In Assassin's Creed, you can finish the 3-part boss battle in about 10 seconds if you use the hidden blade to counter, or if you get a knockdown-type counter with a sword, sprint over while switching to the hidden blade and nail 'em when they're prone/supine.
  • In Assassin's Creed II, the final boss Rodrigo Borgia, aka the Spaniard, aka Pope Alexander VI has a Piece of Eden and a lot of health, but neither helps him much against five Ezios. After this, you fight him with just your fists, and if you choose, you can beat him by repeatedly kneeing him in the groin.
  • In Brotherhood, his son Cesare Borgia essentially acts like a Papal Guard using a Longsword, except that he's immune to executions and counter kill attempts. While there are periodic guard spawns, an experienced player can quickly wipe them out in a single kill streak of counter kills and executions, so this final boss fight (as with "The Spaniard" in AC2) amounts to whittling down his health — making this one of the only fights in the game where a weapon's Damage stat matters. Story-wise, Ezio was already 48 years old while Cesare was only 31.
  • Assassin's Creed: Revelations has nearly every boss encounter be this. Leandros, the Templar captain who tries to execute Ezio in the start of the game, is assassinated in the first memory sequence without even a fight. Near the end, Manuel Palaiologos is far easier to kill than the Janissary Elite Mooks; a single counter and he's down. You fight Big Bad Ahmet while both of you are falling off a mountain and it only lasts about 14-17 seconds. And to top it off, you don't kill him; he's strangled by a supporting character and then violently thrown off a cliff. Lastly, the penultimate memory of Altaïr consists of him walking up to Abbas and shooting him with the newly created Hidden Gun.
  • Assassin's Creed III:
    • Daniel Cross, despite being built up as a Hero Killer, regularly fails to live up to his hype. In his first encounter with Desmond, he gets knocked out cold within seconds of their meeting. In their second, he runs away, calls for back-up, and is no harder than any other enemy in the game. In the final encounter, Daniel begins suffering from the Bleeding Effect, which causes him to go nuts before running away. He doesn't even get a fight, he just gets chased down and assassinated.
    • Haytham Kenway, despite being the best individual fighter amongst the Templars and the Big Bad, gets a relatively easy fight in the game's climax; both Connor and he have been wounded at the time, so the fight's poor on both sides, and it consists entirely of countering him three times while standing next to an object so you can hit him with it. This is made worse by the fact that the game outright tells you to do this at the start of the fight while the actual kill consists of a Press X to Not Die.
• In Fragile Dreams, we have Shin. While tedious, both battles with him can be won without a scratch with a Crossbow (and the Merchant and enemies to grind money are just a minute of backtracking away to buy it), as his only attacks are slow-moving projectiles and a telegraphed laser.
• Hitman:
  • Hitman: Codename 47: After beating a bunch of jumped up super clones with miniguns, you then have to face... a weakling scientist with a tazer.
  • In Hitman: Blood Money, the final showdown with Mark Parchezzi III is over in 5 seconds if you just use your scoped pistols to find his noggin and down him in one shot from a respectable distance. This is guaranteed, as any player who made it this far is not just going to rush headlong into the firefight. Other ways to end the fight quickly include rigging explosives in his path, or going into first person mode to shoot him before his bomb goes off. Or if you leave a bomb where he shoots from.
  • In Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, the final target, Sergei Zavorotko, is a muscle-bound bullet sponge able to take a ridiculous amount of bullets compared to the other characters... unless you shoot him in the head, which kills him in one hit and is something the player should probably be good at doing by now.
  • Hitman: Contracts has Inspector Fournier. Considering that you have to dodge dozens of heavily armed and armoured GIGN officers to get to him, he's just one unarmoured guy with a pistol and a megaphone who goes down as quickly as any other target.
  • Hitman: Absolution gives us Blake Dexter. Despite being armed with a BFG, the rooftop of Blackwater Park is shrouded in mist, making sneaking up on him and dealing with him via headshot or strangulation rather easy.
• In Manhunt, the penultimate boss is Piggsy. He's an absolutely insane asylum escapee who wears the head of a pig as some sort of helmet/mask combination, doesn't appear on the radar, wields a chainsaw capable of killing the player in a handful of hits, jumps out of the shadows to give you heart attacks on top of heart attacks, and is (just so we're clear) utterly bonkers. After you kill him, you finally confront the man who's forced you to become his insane snuff film project. He takes a few potshots at you with his pistol before you gut him like a fish.
• Metal Gear:
  • When you meet Sniper Wolf for the last time in Metal Gear Solid, either you take her using your PSG-1 sniper rifle in a relatively challenging fight, or you can just run slightly to the right of your starting position into a small alcove and use your Nikita remote-controlled missiles to render her completely helpless.
  • The End in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater can be defeated in one of two extremely easy ways: shoot him after his introductory cutscene (if you have the SVD Dragunov at that point), causing him to explode and his fight to be replaced by a team of Ocelot soldiers; or save and quit the game during his fight and come back after at least a week in real time, which will result in him dying of old age (coming back after less than a week results in a cutscene of him waking up Snake while dragging him back to jail). Probably the only example of someone being BOTH That One Boss and an Anti-Climax Boss.
• The three house leaders in Shinobido can be assassinated like other enemies. On the other hand, the actual ninja leaders like Kabuto, Hebitonbo, and the Final Boss Garaman can't be wrestled or one-shotted and are immune to sneak attacks.
• Splinter Cell:
  • Splinter Cell: You snipe Kombayn Nikoladze through a window and make a quick escape.
  • Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow: You engage Norman Soth and a handful of his flunkies. Soth goes down just as easily as his men do. Some players even miss the fact they just killed Soth and think he was just another random enemy.
  • Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory: Admiral Otomo stabs himself in the stomach while you watch through a bulletproof window. Your final objective is to save him and then return to the surface for pickup.
  • Splinter Cell: Double Agent:
    • Emile Dufraisne is easily killed with any of your normal attacks. Hell, punching him will count as a kill! His infrared signature will grow cool quickly after he hits the ground, signifying death. Like Soth above, it can be quite easy to mistake him for a regular Mook.
    • If you unlock the secret final mission, Carson Moss takes a tiny bit more effort to beat than Dufraisne, namely some Button Mashing. He drops dead with absolutely zero fanfare.
    • In the sixth generation version of the game, however, the battle against Dufraisne plays out like a more traditional boss battle, at least until you either get to your gun or run up and stab him.
• In the first Tenchu game, after you infiltrate a compound guarded by ninjas and defeat The Dragon, you meet the boss: a helpless evil merchant with a gun. You CAN lose to him if you have barely any health left and he shoots you, but defeating him is easy. This is done again in Tenchu: Fatal Shadows. After tracking down the evil ninja you're pursuing... he declines to fight. His mistress, an untrained geisha with a dagger, instead confronts you. It may be possible to lose if you stand there, have almost no health left, and let her stab you, but you can kill her with one throw.
• Primal Erin in Thief stalks you throughout the game and spends all of her time displaying disturbing and powerful abilities. You beat her by crawling around the arena, occasionally ducking behind cover to avoid her single attack, and picking up three pieces of the shattered stone. She doesn't even move!

Survival Horror

• Alone in the Dark: The first game final boss. To beat him, Emily/Edward must cross the flooded room and reach the altar while dodging the Deep Ones and the fireballs, then put the talisman on the altar, light the lamp, and eventually throw it right in the tree.
• Scissorwoman Jemima from Clock Tower 3, for the simple fact that they tried to make her harder by disabling auto-aim for the battle. That's right, the same auto-aim you've been swearing at all game for making bosses much harder to beat than they should be. Now since you're free to lead your target and shoot where she's moving to, Jemima goes down in a couple very happy minutes with zero effort.
• Kirie from Fatal Frame was intentionally made this way by the developers. She has a One-Hit Kill if the player gets touched by her, the area suffers some earthquakes that makes it difficult to aim the camera, and the only way the Camera Obscura damages her is if it's a fully-loaded Fatal Frame shot. However, she is incredibly slow, so the player can walk circles around her.

Third-Person Shooter

• Your battle against Major Dan Cater from C-12: Final Resistance. As far as plot-relevant bosses goes, Carter's an easy Puzzle Boss with a single unprotected weak spot, where he goes down after shooting at it for five seconds.
• Danger Girl: Each and every one of the girls have their own designated bosses; Sydney Savage gets to fight Assassin X, a badass Ninja who spam shurikens and Teleport Spam, JC battles the brutal military powerhouse known as the Hammer Commander, and the protagonist Abbey Chase? She fights Natasia Kasle just like in the comics, except now Kasle is a pathetic "Get Back Here!" Boss who throws mooks at Abbey while fleeing for her life in an Indian Temple, before escaping to the edge of a pit where she's easily blown apart in a shootout before falling through the pit. And that's the game's Final Boss!
• Dead Space:
  • The game features Dr. Challus Mercer, one of the main antagonists who turns up to make Issac's life difficult at various points throughout the game. He is a devout Unitologist who is trying to bring the Necromorphs back to Earth, believing them to be the next stage in human evolution. Naturally, he willingly allows himself to be transformed into a Necromorph in one of the later chapters of the game, and players are fully expecting to fight him as a boss, or at least a sub-boss. Imagine the disappointment when, instead of transforming into the expected super-powerful boss, he simply transforms into a regular enemy.
  • The Hive Mind; it is about the size of a building, and is easily one of the more nightmarish Necromorphs, but it is very easy to beat; its main attack is telegraphed and so slow that it can be dodged very easily. The only tricky part in the encounter is when it tries to eat Isaac, as it can be hard to aim for its weak spots, but if you've managed to fight your way through the entire Ishimura, it should pose no real challenge. Not only is its main attack slow, but it only does around half a bar of damage. And this is right after it shows the hivemind picking up Kendra and gibbing her in a single throw.
• In Freedom Fighters (2003), the Soviet General Tatarin is assasinated with a single sniper shot to the head. Even if you go against the level design and instead run up to him to fight him, he turns out to be no stronger than the standard Soviet soldiers you've been mowing through the entire game, and dies with a couple bursts of assault rifle fire. He is, however, protected by a dozen or so Soviet Elite Mooks and a heavily armored, machinegun-wielding Giant Mook.
• In Gears of War 2, you fight Skorge, who was built up the be the boss, in the penultimate chapter. The real final boss is a Lambent Brumak, which you fight with a Hammer of Dawn in an on-rails segment. Even on Insane, this thing is easy. All you need to do is hold down the fire button and it will die.
• In Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, this happens to both villains. Glazer (who turns on you early in the game) gets killed by a sniper just before you reach him (after chasing him through a whole level). Lynch kills Shangsi in a cutscene. The final "bosses" of the game... are a pair of dogs that chase you at the very end of the final level.
• Red Faction:
  • Guerrilla has General Roth, who comes at you in a tank at the end of the final mission. Though his tank is more durable than others, he can be easily killed with a Rail Driver.
  • Armageddon has Adam Hale, who, after a literal on-rails chase sequence on a mine cart, is fought as a boss. Despite the instant kill trigger if he gets close to you, the battle is extremely easy if you use the Magnet Gun to send the first ceiling ball flying towards his Mantis heavy walker, which can take off a gigantic amount of his health. After finally disabling the walker, Hale's severed head just falls. Hilariously, the same thing doesn't happen to Darius when he wrecks his own Mantis towards the end of the game.
• In SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy Seals, Lt. Park chases a bleeding Gorman (injured via the mayhem you caused at the embassy) into a train station as he tries to escape. The final cutscene is him crying like a bitch while you decide whether to kill him or leave him to the local authorities.
• Splatoon 2:
  • In the first Splatoon, the final boss DJ Octavio proved to be the biggest challenge in the game; not only did he make use of an ever-increasing arsenal of weapons and tactics, but his boss stage was an entire level in and of itself that tested you on everything you learned in the game up until that point. Combined with his hammy pun-based banter (at least in the North American version) and catchy music, it made the whole fight very memorable for players. In the sequel? He fights you in a much smaller arena not all that different from the other bosses in the game, has far less weapons and tactics at his disposal, the memorable boss banter is not there (at least, not to the extent of the first game), and overall takes far less effort on part of the player to dispatch him. Even the spectacle of the final phase of the fight, in which you are grinding on rails, dodging his fists while firing a modified Rainmaker at him, cannot sate the feelings of disappointment players felt when challenging him again. The ironic part is that the other bosses in Splatoon 2 are much tougher than their counterparts were in Splatoon, and DJ Octavio in fact proves to be less of a challenge than the preceding Octo Shower.
  • The Final Boss of Octo Expansion is a Turf War on the NILS statue in which you try to detonate all of the Hyperbombs that Marina sets on the statue for you to blow up. While it can be a challenge the first time trying to learn all of the Ride Rails' paths and the optimal path for finding and shooting all of the bombs in the time allotted, the "fight" has no enemies whatsoever, whereas the boss immediately beforehand is an SNK Boss fight with Agent 3 where you are liable to die at any second at any time. And even if you do lose, the game will immediately offer to let you skip the fight, whereas the testing chambers each require failing twice in a row and the escape phases each require failing five times in a row.
• Splatoon 3: The fight against the fourth boss, Big Man, is a fantastic Company Cross Reference to Super Mario Sunshine. But while the Phantamanta fight it homages is one of the toughest bosses in Sunshine, Big Man is undoubtedly the easiest in this game. Simply rushing in and shooting blindly can allow one to divide and conquer the boss with zero issue. The fight becomes even more anticlimactic, however, if you have activated the "Get Sensor" Level 2 upgrade that allows you to track the location of objects/enemies regardless of whether you're submerged in ink or not. The sensor allows you to see through the boss's Doppelgänger Attack, with a red icon marking the real one as opposed to the others having yellow icons. Shooting at everything that moves? You can probably beat the fight in two minutes, tops. With the sensor? It shouldn't take you more than a minute.
• Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike has Sarkli, a formerly tough boss on Geonosis, return for a shootout on Endor. He's so easy to beat you can escape while doing so. And with the bonus missions included, the final boss is the impressive but easy to beat Executor capital ship.
• The Ork Warboss in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine wasn't nearly as hard as any of the random Ork swarm fights earlier in the game. And the final boss, who is a goddamn Daemon-Prince, is defeated entirely through a single button mashing spiced with primitive and repetitive QTE.
• In WinBack:
  • After several boss battles against the various themed members of the Quirky Mini Boss Squad, the terrorist leader turns out to be just a regular guy with a pistol and a light armor vest, and although he has a boss-like health bar, he still goes down pretty easily.
  • The Post-Final Boss battle with The Dragon / The Starscream, Cecile, is even more pathetic; just shoot out the laser power boxes, then man the machinegun and mow him down.

Turn-Based Strategy

• After Sturm proved to be a decent challenge in the first Advance Wars and bordered on SNK Boss in the second, you'd think his successor in Dual Strike would prove to be at least as much of a challenge. What you instead get is Von Bolt, a frail old man whose day-to-day power - a piddly 10% attack/defense bonus - pales in comparison to Sturm's 20% boosts to both stats and unrestricted movement across terrain. The differential between their Super Powers simply drives the point home: Sturm not only dropped a meteor on a large clump of your troops, dealing a whopping 8 damage to anything caught in the blast, but his firepower and defense got boosted to even further levels of absurdity. Von Bolt, meanwhile, gets a weak little zap that only deals 3 damage while also disabling anything damaged by it for a turn, something Sturm didn't need because his victims would be too crippled to do much of anything on their next turn anyway other than flee for repairs. The final cherry on top is the fact that, in the final missions in which you square off against him, Von Bolt is actually at a distinct disadvantage due to the way the maps are designed, turning the endgame into a total cakewalk even without Dual Strike's notoriously broken Tag Breaks and Forces. Fortunately (or perhaps not), the next game in the series, Days of Ruin, would proudly return to the tradition of having a final boss that makes you want to tear your hair out.
• Harebrained Schemes' Battletech: The Final Boss is Victoria, comitting Suicide by Cop against Kamea and your mercenary company. While the actual in-game challenge would be formidable in the lore, considering what the player is likely to possess by the endgame and Kamea's Atlas II her battle is more emotional catharsis than an actual challenge. The boss' AI is also commanded not to engage until the player gets to a certain range, which more or less guarantees the first shot (and kill) goes to the player.
• Crystal Warriors is a game where the bosses are a joke compared to the difficult levels, and the same applies to the final boss, Emperor Jyn. He looks huge and intimidating, and has the highest stats of any enemy in the game, but he can still make only one move per turn and is locked to melee, while you can potentially have up to 9 units ganging up on him. Once his support is down, it's pitifully easy to surround him on all sides with melee units, then have your mages chip him down while Iris or Frye heal the units blocking him. Jyn also doesn't move off his castle until you get close, so if you play defensively and lure away his support enemies, they'll be outnumbered by you, and he'll be a sitting duck. The level may have 4 Pyros, but it is nothing compared to round 15 before it.
• The final boss of Disgaea 2 is very easy for the fact that unlike any of the other final bosses in the series, he has no minions to deal with, meaning it's just a simple task of whittling down his less-than-impressive HP before he can defeat all 10 of your units.
• St. Ajora/Altima goes down pathetically easily in the final battle of Final Fantasy Tactics, even if you're not using an overleveled party or Thunder God Cid. In fact, even with a moderately leveled party (matching the level of the characters you fight in the final dungeon), you can kill both of her forms with just a handful of attacks.
• The final stages of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is unlocked only by completing the standard 300 missions of the game, including the final boss of the main plot, the challenging Li-Grim. For the bonus missions, the final boss is three pathetically easy judges who will fall quickly to your powerful party.

• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light:
    • Michalis, despite being a major Arc Villain, is really no threat at all in the original game. He is fairly sturdy, but his equipment is just a common Javelin, meaning he doesn't hit very hard and has low Speed. He's also a flier, which means a single shot from Parthia can usually bring him down. He got buffed pretty heavily in later appearances, with his Mystery of the Emblem incarnation gaining an Iote's Shield to block his bow weakness and being no longer a Stationary Boss.
    • Gharnef is immune to all damage due to his Imhullu tome, unless the attacker has the Starlight tome, turning him into a Hopeless Boss Fight when fought the first time. However, if fought in the rematch with Starlight, he's quite easy; any mage with 15 Speed can double him with Starlight and kill him in three hits, before mentioning that Imhullu's accuracy is a little on the low side; add in a Barrier spell or a Talisman, and he's no threat at all. Notably, the midgame bishop Boah starts with 15 Speed. The only real challenge in the fight is finding Gharnef, as he has a bunch of doppelgangers scattered throughout the level, but even then, just check which one is using an Imhullu tome. He's significantly harder in the DS remake, though, due to his stats having gotten a major kick.
    • Medeus, the final boss, is weak to Falchion, the game's Infinity +1 Sword that gets obtained by killing Gharnef. He may have a total of 35 Defense, but Marth with capped Strength (easy to have when a Power Ring provides a +4 to Strength) and Falchion has 50 Attack, enough to kill Medeus in just three hits, or a single crit. He's somewhat harder if you don't have Falchion, but if you don't, then you still probably have the Starsphere to make your weapons indestructible, letting you whittle him down with things like Gradivus or Mercurius. The DS remake zigzags this somewhat; he is now far stronger in the stat department, but he's also weak to the Divinestone when he wasn't before, making it possible for a Divine Dragon to two-shot him (though they likely won't survive the process).
  • Medeus's battle when he's the Shadow Dragon himself in Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem. He's definitely a lot scarier, he cuts the attacking power of people attacking him in half, and his primary attack is a Fixed Damage Attack that can two-shot anything at minimum, but his accuracy is downright terrible—he has a base 70% and 0 Skill, so he's likely to have an accuracy in the low 30% range against endgame units, and his 0 Speed makes it impossible for him to double people. Add in the fact that Marth still has the Falchion and probably extremely high Strength at this point, and Tiki's divine dragon transformation, and they should have little trouble chopping through his HP. The real challenge is rescuing the maidens next to him, since this is required for the good ending and if one of them is alive when he dies, he eats them to regain his health, making the fight take longer. The remake, however, makes him far more dangerous.
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War:
    • Julius, the final boss, is ordinarily That One Boss. His stats are extremely good, and he's armed with the Loptous tome, which, aside from a notable boost to his already high Resistance, halves your attack power before defence is applied, making it near impossible to do any damage to him. And he's got a good selection of skills, too — Charge lets him keep blasting you with his Meteor tome from afar, Nihil means you can't hope for a lucky crit, and if you get his HP below 40, Wrath kicks in, meaning his attacks are now critting hard enough to one-shot nearly anything. Oh, and he regenerates 20 HP every turn. So what makes him fit this trope? If you recruited Julia back, she'll have the Naga tome, which negates the attack-halving effect of Loptous, sticks on massive statboosts on top of that, and with her crazy resistance and the HP-regenerating Circlet item, he can barely damage her. And she also has Nihil, which shuts down Wrath. As long as you got her back (not that it's easy, mind you...), beating him is a cakewalk.
    • Bishop Manfroy, the mastermind of most of the game's events, really isn't much more than a slightly beefed-up Dark Bishop. He has good stats and some Leadership Stars, but his weapon is the fairly common Jormungand tome, which doesn't boost up his stats and is so heavy that it tanks his Speed down from 24 to 12. At that point, his Adept and Pursuit skills (which trigger based on Speed) aren't very helpful, and Seliph with Tyrfing is probably going to be taking minimal damage and doubling Manfroy in return. Compared to Ishtar, who's fought in the same map and has 30 Speed while weighed down by her Tome, Manfroy is little more than a speedbump—then again, reaching him tends to be the real challenge, as it requires you to rush your way through or past a dozen powerful enemies while Julius is shooting meteors at you.
  • Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 is a rather difficult game, considered by many to be the hardest in the early series. Except that its final boss, Veld (or Berdo or Beld/Berd, depending on who translated it), is essentially just an overleveled Dark Bishop (a fairly common Elite Mook) with moderately high stats, some extra Leadership Stars, and a unique tome. While the map he's on is quite difficult, taking Veld himself down is barely any harder than dealing with any other Dark Bishop, not requiring any special weapons or specific characters. He'd actually lose if you tossed him up against most of the minibosses in the very chapter you fight him in. If you want to humiliate him, it's pretty easy to use Tina and her Thief Staff to whisk away that special Tome and defang him completely, and since he has only 11 Build, you can follow this up by capturing him.
  • In Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, the "true ending" can only be reached by having all eight legendary weapons and the Binding Blade in your inventory, and Fa must still be alive, at which point the game will continue on for three more levels past the climactic battle with Zephiel. The bosses of these three bonus levels — Brunnya, Jahn, and Idunn — are all far easier to beat than Zephiel! Bruunya is actually pretty effective, being a Sage with a very powerful tome, but not particularly notable. Jahn, the second to last boss, is just a Manakete with slightly higher stats, except the level thus far has contained Manaketes and only Manaketes at a time where the player is loaded to the brim with dragon-slaying weapons that take him out in about 2 hits. He also doesn't have 2 range and is immobile, so you can just safely bombard him with arrows/spells. The final boss, Idunn, goes down quite easily, and not even the extra qualifier that the real true ending only occurs if the Binding Blade is used to strike the final blow should keep you from being able to see it. Idunn in particular is infamous for the fact that Roy with the Binding Blade can kill her even on a 0% Growths run in just 3 hits. Due to an oversight, she doesn't even get increased stats on Hard Mode, barring a single hit point—particularly notable since Binding Blade's Hard Mode is notable for giving enemies a lot of bonus levels. Even reaching her isn't at all difficult, since she's sitting in the middle of a big room with no enemies initially blocking the path to her, and the player should have access to a very powerful Warp staff and possibly the mobility-boosting Boots.
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade's Denning, a late-game boss... of the Sniper class, leaving him unable to hit any unit in an adjacent square to him. Since you have to spend the full number of turns in the level even if you beat him in advance, most players find it preferable to surround him with four units and leave him until the final turn so enemy reinforcements continue to spawn for experience. Note that this is two chapters from the endgame.
  • Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones:
    • Major villain Valter is in a good class, but he doesn't tend to move much, making his mobility largely pointless. He did remember to pack a Fili Shield for Contractual Boss Immunity to anti-flyer weapons... and this means that you can steal it, at which he'll usually die in two shots to a silver bow.
    • Fomortiis is definitely a powerhouse statwise, but he has the issue that when you encounter him, you have a mess of S-rank sacred weapons that all have their massive attack power doubled against him. He will also always spend his first turn summoning a bunch of ally monsters that don't move on the turn he brings them out, and starts right within range of the two main protagonists, meaning that's a minimum of two free shots at him. Simply bumrushing him with a bunch of Sacred Twin users tends to result in him dying in under two turns.
  • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance:
    • Oliver is a corrupt senator who serves as the villain for the portion of the game that takes place in Begnion. After several chapters of chasing him (one of which consists of four separate battles), you finally corner him... And while his stats aren't too bad, they aren't anything special either. To add to it, about halfway through the final battle against him, a group of four friendly units, one of whom is extremely broken at this point in the game, will show up and start decimating Oliver's remaining forces. At this point, as long as you aren't outright trying to get yourself killed, the battle is yours — even if you refuse to aid them, Tibarn and his forces will eventually finish the chapter on their own. The actual challenge is to make sure that one of your units deals the final blow so you can get Oliver's Nosferatu tome.
    • Petrine is one of the more prominent antagonists throughout the game, being the only one of Daein's Four Riders other than The Black Knight himself to be a major character and a recurring threat throughout the story. She's built up to be an extremely formidable warrior who is able to fight Greil of all people into a stalemate, and has practically made a sport out of roasting her enemies with her famed Flame Lance. Alas, when you finally get to fight her late in the game, it turns out that said Flame Lance runs off of her magic stat, which, while high for a physical-based class, is still not high enough to be truly deadly. As a result, characters with high resistance, especially Sages, will barely be scratched by it, and will be able to make short work of her in return.
  • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn:
    • The Black Knight. You've spent the better part of two games waiting to kill this guy, and when the battle finally comes, Ike stomps him. With a well-trained Ike (which is extremely likely, given his high base statline and being available for most of the game), you can literally do nothing and you'll still win just by counterattacking; and if you equip Ike with a Hammer, you can kill him in a single attack. The hardest part of the battle is keeping him alive long enough for your other characters to get the Wishblade from the Optional Boss Levail. This is especially disappointing when you consider how hard he was in Path of Radiance.
    • Most members of the Begnion senate are this. They're all fought in Part 4, in the chapters preceding the Endgame, but since all of them are Bishops with low defense and speed, they are practically jokes who stand no chance against your army. The last two that you have to fight don't have any protection against your Secret Art skills, and by this point, Ike alone can solo them. The hardest part about these bosses is getting past the Cannon Fodder.
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening:
    • Mad King Gangrel is the early-game Climax Boss... but he just happens to be a promoted Thief class, making him a Fragile Speedster, thus he goes down incredibly quickly. The only mildly troublesome thing about him is a skill that boosts his Accuracy and Evasion by 20 until the 7th turn, but it's still reasonably easy to take him out before then.
    • The first time you fight Validar in Chapter 22, he has the exact same stats he had in the premonition at the very beginning of the game. But then you fight him again with stats appropriate for that stage in the game, and he is still largely a non-threat due to his abysmal Speed and lack of any powerful Skills despite being a Level 18 Sorcerer. Hard Mode does toughen him up considerably, though, giving him the Dragonskin ability (the only other enemy who has it is the Final Boss), as well as the very dangerous Vengeance skill.
    • Aversa also falls into this since, like all flying units, she suffers from a crippling weakness to bows and wind magic, and can be easily curbstomped by any appropriately-leveled unit with access to either.
  • Fire Emblem Fates:
    • Leo in Birthright Chapter 18 is built up as a powerful opponent and the confrontation with the Avatar — who he considered his brother/sister — is emotional, but he's a joke of a boss. He has very low stats for a Level 12 promoted unit (he has better stats bar HP when he joins as a playable unit in Conquest Chapter 14, and at Level 2), so he poses little threat, plus he's fought in a very small map that makes it easy to just run up to him and beat him in one or two turns.
    • Garon is the second-to-last boss of both Birthright and Conquest, but he's not very threatening. His main weapon is an axe, which naturally has low accuracy (especially if against an opponent with Weapon Triangle advantage). As long as the Avatar hasn't been reclassed to something that can't use a sword, they can just walk right up to Garon and use the upgraded Yato to easily take him out in a round or two.
    • If the player trained the Avatar well, Xander can become this in Birthright Chapter 26, as it will only take one or two hits from the Noble Yato to down him, on top of this being possible to do in one turn. It doesn't help that this comes after Elise's death, and it's especially jarring given that Xander was a walking Hopeless Boss Fight in Birthright Chapter 12.
    • It should be noted that, besides Garon, there are plot reasons suggesting the characters weren't going all out. Leo outright states that he was testing the Avatar, and Xander (having just killed his little sister) basically doesn't WANT to live anymore, and it shows, as his Strength and Defense are LOWER than they were in Chapter 12.
    • Similar to Xander above, Gunter in Revelation Chapter 26, despite being the boss at a climactic point of the story with higher stats than the above Xander in all but HP and Skill, complete with the same map and battle themes as Birthright King Garon, is an unfortunately easy boss. Despite having higher defenses than Xander in Birthright Chapter 26, complimented by the enemy-exclusive Dragonskin and Status Immunity skills, Gunter has no special weapons to speak of, nor one of the many enemy-exclusive no-drawback 1-2 range weapons, leaving him vulnerable to being picked off at range (or at close quarters if switching to the Tomahawk), even starting with a equipped Brave Lance that reduces both defensive stats by 4, on top of no other abilities other than the aforementioned enemy-exclusive skills to make him particularly threatening. That, along with the low speed of 17 not only preventing the Brave Lance from being particularly deadly in the enemy phase, as well as the Great Knight class' vulnerability to both Armorslayers, Beast Killers and especially Hammers all make for a disappointing pre-final chapter boss battle.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses
    • The second fight with Solon, who is fought and defeated at Chapter 10, two chapters from the end of the first part. Given that Byleth has just collected their Infinity +1 Sword, he has an unfortunate tendency to get beheaded in a single shot. No crits. No combat arts. No gambits. Just a single clean shot. Then again, this might be intentional...
    • The fight against Cornelia in the Azure Moon route, faced in the crucial battle to liberate the capital of the Kingdom, the homeland of the Blue Lions (the house starring in this route), has all the makings of a hard level and fight. However, if the player gets past the first selection of enemies with the middle group and has a unit with Warp, they can simply Warp a unit over the wall, allowing them to easily kill Cornelia in one turn. What's more, Dimitri can casually do this in one hit thanks to his Crest weapon. While not every unit has Warp, most players will probably have Lysithea because of how strong she is. Even if you don't have Warp, Ingrid as a Pegasus Knight can easily kill her thanks to her good Speed and Resistance. Once she's defeated, the level ends, making it potentially the shortest chapter in the game.
    • The Azure Moon final boss, Hegemon Edelgard, looks intimidating, with a demonic design, enormous range, and ability to attack twice, but the remaining soldiers prove to be a greater threat than the monster. The projectile attacks can hit across the entire map, but they have both a low hit rate and low attack power for any unit with halfway decent defense. After reaching a certain part of the map, the attacks will cease and the boss becomes a sitting duck. Because of the boss's single armor point, underwhelming defense, average health, low damage, and typical weaknesses associated with monster enemies, it's possible to beat them in a single turn. Additionally, while the final boss could be threatening if they just focused on one character with low defenses, like Lysithea or Flayn, they will only ever target the same person twice if no one else is in their range, which is exceedingly unlikely to be the case except for maybe the first turn. Furthermore, if Dimitri is within range of the final boss's attacks, the final boss will target him, despite him being easily the worst choice to target given his insane speed and defenses making the attacks more or less moot. The enemies themselves on the map are tough, but Myson, an otherwise generic unit mini-boss serving as the last leader among the Slitherer forces, is far more dangerous than the final boss, given he has a highly accurate tome that brings your HP to 1, has awesome range, and is surrounded by units who can pick you off. It's worth noting this only applies to both Normal and Hard difficulties. In Maddening, Hegemon Edelgard's stats are high enough to hit harder, be far more accurate, nab a Critical Hit against allies with low Luck, and trigger low-health abilities consistently.
    • The final boss of the Verdant Wind route, Nemesis, is just a beefy human with no break bars, no truly special attacks, and on Normal has very low Speed, allowing most of your units to double him. While he does have a dangerous class skill called Mighty King of Legend that gives him +3 to all stats for each member of the 10 Elites alive, given that you need to defeat them all to even fight him, this means that he loses the only part of his arsenal that is a threat. The hardest part about him is removing the barrier to even hit him, and the fact that he is on a tile that gives him some defense and avoid thanks to also having Heartseeker, but he can be baited off of the tile with a sturdy enough ranged unit and is still vulnerable to Gambits. It's possible to kill him in one hit with Byleth if they use the Sublime Creator Sword, or Lysithea if she uses Luna, something the other final bosses lack as a weakness because they are Monster type enemies and have at minimum three bars of HP. To add some insult to injury, Lysithea can do so without a crit even while all 10 elites are alive due to Luna ignoring the applicable Res buff. Similiar to Azure Moon's Final Boss, he is much harder on the higher difficulties (though he doesn't gain any HP, making it just as easy for Lysithea to delete him with Luna with the right setup), of course, but compared to the other final bosses, he's very straightforward.
    • The final boss of the Cindered Shadows DLC, Umbral Beast Aelfric, is a joke if you make good use of all your units and the tools they have at their disposal. First off, unlike most other Fire Emblem final bosses, they are fought in an enclosed room and will take your forces a maximum of two turns to get close enough to strike, even if you play defensively. Secondly, they may summon phantoms of who they were before they turned into a monster to steal HP from and harass you, but they can easily be ripped in half by the likes of Hilda and Balthus. Thirdly, a mixture of several high-Movement units on your side, several wide-hitting Battalions, and some good positioning makes it absurdly easy to inflict a total armor break on them in a single turn. Fourthly, Hapi’s personal Skill Monstrous Appeal effectively makes her a meat-shield for the rest of your army, provided that Linhardt keeps her health up. Play your cards right, and it’s extremely likely that Cindered Shadows’s finale won’t last for more than six turns.
    • From a narrative standpoint, Those Who Slither In The Dark. On the Verdant Wind and Silver Snow routes, they're dealt with in the penultimate chapter, with their leader killed and their secret base destroyed in the course of a single battle.

• The final mission of Front Mission. Once the flunkies and the mini-boss are destroyed, the final boss' first form is completely immobile and all its attacks have a maximum radius, so if you've fitted your wanzers with missile launchers, you can chip away his health without him being able to damage you. The second form is more powerful than most standard enemies, but it's a mech that you've fought and beaten several times before (Driscoll's), so you should know what to expect by now. On top of that, this is the only mission where you can deploy all the pilots you've recruited over the course of the game, so you're more than welcome to Zerg Rush him if that's your style.
• Heroes of Might and Magic: The final mission of the original game requires you to sail to an island in the center of the map and capture the Dragon City there, which leads to a final battle against 20 Dragons. While Dragons are the strongest units in the game, a decently-sized army led by a high-level Hero won't have too much trouble with them, and without a human leader, the dragons don't get a bonus to their stats or spell assistance. The previous three missions against the rival lords are significantly more challenging, especially Lord Alamar (the Warlock lord) who's likely to have twice as many dragons, as well as dozens of other units, by the time you face him.
• Jagged Alliance 2's Big Bad is Queen Diedrianna. She has great stats, great armor, and great weapons... but then so do the mooks by that stage of the game. And for that matter, so does your squad. And unless you've done something wrong, there's eighteen mercs in your squad by this point. Her swarm of Elite Mooks are much more of a problem than she is, especially as she doesn't join the fight until you actively shoot at her. And she succumbs with ridiculous ease to a single mustard gas grenade.
• Not strictly a boss (rather, an optional encounter) but Asagi Asagiri in Makai Kingdom is rather anticlimactic. Most event battles (such as your fellow overlords) have enemies well over level 1000 with ultimate equipment, and require the wishmaker to be in the hundreds and pay a few thousand mana to unlock. Asagi's event require a level 1000 wishmaker and costs 100,000 mana, and... she's level 50. Completely alone. Without any noteworthy equipment. Zetta himself mocks her weakness and refuses to let her become a protagonist until he's pounded some actual skill into her. The rest... is history.
• The Final Boss of Gorky 17/Odium. Lots of health, powerful attacks, powerful armor. ...And he's not immune to tranquilizing (which renders him unable to act at all for several turns) — and by that point in the game, you have enough equipment to easily keep him stunned for the entire battle. Oops.
• After a certain event in La Pucelle: Tactics, you have to replay a challenging boss fight against a demon lord and his mooks with only one character. However, said character (Croix) is suddenly level 100 (while, barring a lot of Level Grinding, the rest of your party won't be nearly at that level), gains wicked stats, and even more wicked special attacks. Oh, and he floats all the time too, so you know he's badass. The only real challenge in this fight is making sure you don't accidentally kill the transformed innocent villagers turned Mooks. None of the enemies' attacks will even scratch the guy. The cut-scene afterward shows Croix stomping on the defeated demon lord's head; the once mighty demon begging for mercy. He only stops when he finally smashes the demon's head into the ground. This Anti-Climax Boss encounter acts as foreshadowing for The Reveal that Croix is the Dark Prince; The Antichrist of the La Pucelle world.
• The final boss fight South Park: The Fractured but Whole is a battle against Human Kite/Kyle and The Coon/Cartman with both of them being "possessed" by Mitch Conner. You fought them both previously and their tactics haven't changed since then, thus they aren't that difficult to take down. The only challenge comes from one of them cheating by them constantly saying your last hit didn't count and applying status effects on your party because they felt like it. Once Doctor Timothy/Timmy intervenes to stop the cheating, you have the fight in the bag.
• In Super Robot Wars series, sometimes bosses end up becoming this trope due to how powerful your units are or players end up having dealt with a powerful boss in the previous stage.
  • Super Robot Wars: Original Generation Gaiden features in its second-to-last stage Dark Brain, who has the most HP of possibly any boss in the entire series, never mind that one game. He regenerates a third of it every turn and is surrounded by a battalion of bosses in mook's clothing that can severely drain your team's resources before you even start dealing with the boss fight. And then you get to the final level, and face Neo Granzon, the True Final Boss of the Super Robot Wars series. Anyone who knows the history of that particular mech was ready for an epic final battle. And then he turns out to have less than half of Dark Brain's HP, pathetic defenses, and mooks who are carbon copies of a Disc-One Final Boss from two games ago. Your characters have gotten so much stronger since then that some will be literally immune to their attacks. Not exactly a battle that epic songs will be written about.
  • Super Robot Wars T has the final fight between Domon Kasshu and Master Asia complete with their legendary "East is Burning Red!" speech. Except at this point, Domon can literally two-hit kill him at most with zero upgrades. And with upgrades, well...
• Total War: Warhammer: The End Times is a scripted late game event that heralds the end of a campaign and spawns several high-level Chaos armies in an attempt to burn the Old World to the ground. Unfortunately, the characters leading said armies are all level 1, making their armies enormously gimped by the game's auto-resolve system (which they're not immune to). While they get bonuses against NPC factions like Kislev and Kraka Drak, once they hit the player they're liable to get bogged down and slain by overwhelming numbers relatively quickly. A common meme about the game is that the game's true Everchosen is the Norscan chieftain Surtha Ek, whose all-chariot armies are likely to have rampaged through the northern Empire multiple times before the End Times even begin.
• Total War: Warhammer II:
  • The Vortex Campaign's final battle, should the player finish the rituals first before the AI, gives the player two Purposefully Overpowered abilities to represent their control over the Vortex. Able to be used infinitely, they will more or less guarantee you victory. CA would later revisit the battle, but it's still not particularly difficult by any stretch — the battle you get if one of the AI factions finishes the battle first is generally considered to be harder even if you've got two AI allies with you, as the defending faction will be given a powerful end-game army and your allies will mostly have low-tier units.
  • The End Times in Mortal Empires (see the first game above) is even easier than in the second game, thanks to a lot of new factions and a lot of rebalancing. Following The Hunter and the Beast, where a patch removed the auto-resolve bonuses 'major' factions gain against 'minor' ones, it's not uncommon to see Kislev invade and settle Norsca before defeating The End Times all on its own without the player's involvement.
• Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate:
  • When you finally meet the Chaos Lord Zymran, you'll find he's actually weaker than any of the Terminators guarding him. He only wears the standard power armour, and his weapons are weaker than that of a Terminator or Assault Marine.
  • When you face the Greater Daemons, it is possible to kill them with one lucky shot from Multi-Melta or just dogpile them with your Terminators and hammer them into ground in a single turn. This is in good part due to Artificial Stupidity: the Daemons will often just sit there until you start attacking them, meaning you have a full turn to unload every single weapon you have into them before they act. Bloodthirster is especially bad, since he cannot walk down the stairs to engage your team in melee combat, and he cannot fly despite having wings.
• X-COM:
  • In X-COM: UFO Defense, you fly to Mars, go through two gigantic battles, enter the final room... and find the leader of the alien forces... a giant brain that can't even defend itself. Sure, there's a lot of Ethereal Commanders in the room, but you could potentially win by having one Redshirt enter the room and throw an explosive at the target, no matter how many other aliens remain.
  • The sequel, Terror From The Deep, has an even easier final mission, especially when compared to the rest of the game. Not only is Cthulhu incapable of hurting you, his bodyguards kinda suck too.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown has a very hard, long final level. The final boss fight, however, can be made laughably easy if you position your troops in the right spot and the squad is of an appropriately high level. There is a good chance the squad can kill the boss in their first turn of combat before it even moves.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• Bully ends with a one-on-one punch-out against teenage sociopath Gary on a collapsing scaffolding on the school's roof. He's no tougher than any of the standard Mooks you've been beating up throughout the game (and may even be weaker, since he barely fights back and spends most of the time trying to block your attacks), whereas you've probably acquired a massive number of brutal moves from the crazy hobo by that point in the game.
• Dwarf Fortress: The megabeasts suprisingly lack Contractual Boss Immunity to traps, including cage traps, making a single row of them at the entrance a reliable fortress defense^note Cage traps never fail, unless they have already caught something else. How does one manage to capture a dragon in a flimsy wooden cage is left assumed a secret of dwarven engineering, much more inexplicable considering other bosses are unaffected by traps altogether.
• Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto games in general subscribe to the "difficult level, easy boss" approach for the games' final missions. Typically, they involve a long, multi-stage action sequence (with no saving or checkpoints!) with vehicular chasing/combat + difficult shootouts against many enemy Mooks, which end with a one-on-one confrontation with the Big Bad who dies after a second or two of assault rifle fire. Such a thing is quite common throughout the entirety of San Andreas. Some sub-bosses do carry armor, but that just adds a second or two to their lives.
• Grand Theft Auto 2: All of the bosses, once the player has completed all of the missions. They come without reinforcements despite not being especially strong in any way — thus, the final mission of each level is just to kill three random enemies as they come.
• The two people you must kill at the end of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories go down in a single well-aimed gunshot each, in contrast to a previous (and connected, storyline-wise) boss-like encounter which can be hard even with super powerful weapons.
• Granted, Mount & Blade is supposed to be a realistic game, so Rank Scales with Asskicking doesn't always fly, but still, don't expect you go into a nice one-on-one duel with the enemy commander, be it a lord or even a king. They DO tend to do a little more damage to your troops than normal Mooks, but thanks to Artificial Stupidity, they often get run down easily by your Red Shirt Army, especially when they charge your army all alone with their troops staying back or taking the first line in a siege, only to get crushed in between the attackers and the defenders.
• Red Dead Redemption: ALL of the bosses are like this, mostly because the focus is more on what happens to the protagonist than on the bosses themselves, and because the whole game is a deconstruction of typical western tropes. Basically, the bosses are treated like human Macguffins.
• In Red Faction: Guerrilla, after a ridiculous trek up Mount Vogel with you in a missile pod tank against the entire EDF, at the summit of the mountain waits General Roth in a standard tank. By this point in the game, you have two weapons that can simply kill Roth inside the tank and leave the vehicle intact, and a few heavy-duty weapons, including two different rocket launchers, that can simply destroy the tank itself. Even if you didn't bring any of these weapons with you, at close range all he can attempt to do is run you over, since his howitzer can't target you and his tank has no secondary machine gun. It's virtually effortless to circle around and take Roth down with mining charges or even the sledgehammer.
• Almost all of the bosses in Saints Row 2. Most of the difficulty in the boss missions comes from fighting your way to the boss past wave after wave after wave of Mooks (and, in some cases, attack choppers with guided missiles). Special mention has to go to the Final Boss, though, since (again, once you actually get to him) he only has three or four guards and is himself only armed with a dinky pistol. Take out his men and you can beat him to death with a crowbar, if you like.
• Saints Row: The Third has (in one of the endings) Kia, a military commander second to Cyrus Temple, head of the elite special forces group called S.T.A.G. The fight is situated under a giant statue that S.T.A.G. rigged with explosives so they can detonate it and get the media to view the Saints as terrorists. Kia has taken Shaundi and Mayor Burt Reynolds hostage (and in the former's case, uses them as a meat shield). She has about all the health of standard S.T.A.G. infantry, and you spend the entirety of this fight picking up and throwing jarred farts at her and shooting her while she's stunned. Considering the massive waves of enemies you had to deal with beforehand, she hardly poses any threat, sans being somewhat dried up of ammo.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours. Copy paste GTA comments here.
• Terraria:
  • While the Golem is a strong boss, it's disappointing for many players who see it as much easier than Plantera, the boss coming immediately before it. Demoted to Breather Boss between Plantera and Duke Fishron as of version 1.2.4.
  • The Moon Lord himself can turn out to be this, depending on your strategy. If you wear Tiki Armor or Spider Armor and summon a Stardust Dragon (with the staff crafted from the appropriate pillar's fragments), then hide in a small house with your nurse, you can just sit there for a minute or two getting healed repeatedly while your dragon kills him for you.
  • The Martian Saucer can be this for similar reasons. Unlike the Moon Lord, though, none of its attacks go through walls. The only damage it can do to you while in a building is splash damage from explosions. Set yourself up in a big enough box, summon your minions outside it, and watch as you get the Cosmic Car Key in record time.
  • With proper preparation and thanks to the ability to create custom arenas, any of the bosses in the game can easily become this. Many players have come up with ways to AFK every boss in the game, most of which can be done before even fighting the boss properly.

Miscellaneous Games

• Ace Attorney
  • In the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Redd White. Despite being the second killer, he's also the man responsible for killing Phoenix's mentor, as well as a powerful blackmailer who has leverage on many law enforcement officials. When he's brought to the stand, it's almost trivially easy to poke holes in his testimony, and Mia's spirit ultimately delivers the decisive blow by threatening to release information on his blackmailing to the media unless he confesses.
  • Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney plays this straight with the true culprit of the final trial, Kristoph Gavin. Once the killer is brought to the stand, exposing him only requires a single evidence presentation and a cross-examination that is solved by using Apollo's Perceive ability. After the latter, there isn't any climactic evidence presentation necessary to convict the killer, who goes into a Villainous Breakdown after learning that a jury will decide his fate. Similarly, Valant Gramarye, who's technically the culprit of the flashback case by virtue of trying to frame Zak, decides to turn himself in after a conversation with Phoenix.
• The final mission of Airforce Delta is a dogfight against a single enemy plane not especially smarter or stronger than the dozen of plane mooks fought throught the game. In the New Game Plus, the Final Boss turns even more pathetically easy if you've bought the Harrier jump jet, as it can easily outmaneuver the boss and provide you optimal time to home in on him with your missiles.
• The Dark Presence in Alan Wake is stationary, its only "attack" is just having chunks of random garbage flying around it, and you have to try real hard to get in its way (in fact, shooting the debris is more challenging and entertaining than the main event, and you don't even need to do that). You have an unlimited supply of ammo and it goes down in about three shots.
• The final mission in Backyard Skateboarding is three tricks (one of which is an ollie). As if the rest of the game weren't already easy...
• The Battle Cats has an Optional Boss that only appears after completing Cats of the Cosmos called Filibuster Obstructa. It’s an all powerful entity and, with the chaos it wields, it might rewrite the laws of reality. Its fight however, isn’t that hard. To make a long story short, despite being able to 1-shot your base from anywhere, which leads to an instant defeat, he can be easily interrupted out of his 40 second attack animation, forcing him to charge it up all over again and, while the enemies that support him are Demonic Spiders, they only come out one at a time and by this point, it’s most likely that one has the cats needed to beat them with little to no effort.
• In Casper on 3DO, PS1, and Sega Saturn, the final boss "battle" has you being chased around a maze by Ghost!Carrigan. You go to the bottom of the maze and pick up the key while dropping coins to keep her distracted, then open the chest in the middle of the maze and wait for her to finish picking up the coins, at which point she starts coming after you again and gets sucked into the chest. You don't even have to use the coins. You can just barely outrun (outfloat?) her and she'll probably only get one hit in as you're opening the chest.
• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: The Mastermind at the sixth Chapter barely puts up a fight against you, it takes one piece of evidence to figure out who is it and they only try a single flimsy defense that doesn't hold any water, their identity is so intensely foreshadowed it's basically an Untwist. That aside from the many problems and the Ending Fatigue does not make a very good final fight for the game.
• Deiland is a survival/crafting game in which a major threat is revealed near the end. Magic attacks are powered by farmable crystals, but crafting your late-game kit uses up a lot of crystals, so the boss has to beatable without using magic.
• The final Wizpig race of Diddy Kong Racing can fall under this category. The items return, the stage layout, while with way more turns and dips, do not require you to perfect every boost, and Wizpig himself is less intimidating than he is. He is actually slower than his running counterpart.
• The Flash Rhythm Game DJManiax plays this for laughs: One of the unlockable songs is "Dash Hopes 3 EX", labeled "Final Final Boss" and has the maximum difficulty rating. When the song starts, the time line starts moving faster and faster, eventually going nuts until it appears on both the top and bottom halves of the screen simultaneously... then it suddenly returns to normal before the first note. The song has all of 7 notes, one every 2 measures, plus one at the end that turns into a bomb, making it by far the easiest song in the game.
• From Falskaar (a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  • While Kolgrim the Orc is by no means weak, he isn't too hard to take down, particularly considering his reputation as Yngvarr's general; lampshaded when Yngvarr comments on his uselessness.
  • Yngvarr himself isn't harmless, but isn't much more difficult than the toughest of Falskaar's bandits. It turns out that this was a deliberate ploy on his part to allow his mages to paralyse everyone and grant him access to the Heart of the Gods... at which point he gets offed by a dragon spirit.
• Hotline Miami:
  • In the eighteenth chapter, when you're playing as the biker, you get to fight the protagonist of the first fifteen chapters of the game — you're reliving an earlier boss battle, this time from the boss's perspective. Simply walk up to the boss, who is a One-Hit-Point Wonder, and kill him with a single melee attack before he manages to do anything. Hilariously, in the original version of the boss battle, when you were playing as the former protagonist against the biker, the boss never thought of doing anything that simple and instead engaged in overtly complex and ultimately suicidal maneuvering.
  • To a lesser extent, the female ninja bodyguard of the mob boss. As she lunges at you, you simply toss a heavy object at her, at which point she falls down and you can just walk up to her and finish her off.
• In LEGO Racers 2, the final boss, Rocket Racer, is the easiest boss in the game. Part of this is because he doesn't cheat, unlike Reigel and the Berg, and the other part is because he goes up ramps, which slow you down.
• Mega Man Legends:
  • The final fight with the Bonnes is against Bruno, what Tron Bonne calls "Her masterpiece." Now, on paper this robot seems pretty tough. It has homing missiles, bomb launchers, anti-air guns (for knocking you off buildings), and twin shield-breaking laser launchers, which, if you got hit, you'd take extra damage from the other weapons. Now, it probably WOULD be a tough boss battle if not for that entrance that you used to reach the boss area in the first place, which can ALSO be used as cover to block practically all of the boss's attacks, and those that aren't blocked (the homing missiles) CAN BE SHOT DOWN. Yep, the Bonnes would've had a good robot if it wasn't for the environmental factor.
  • The Final Boss, Megaman Juno, is no better. All the player has to do is run around the room in circles all the while shooting him with the Buster, only sometimes jumping to avoid his shockwave attacks to beat him in both his forms, often without taking a scratch.
• Arch Pandara of Patapon 3. It is Nintendo Hard getting to it, but he can be beaten with a single strike.
• There are a number of songs in Rock Band that aren't nearly as difficult as their difficult ranking indicates, which can lead to this trope. In particular, in Rock Band 2, "The Trees" is a tier 6 on drums^note but is still easier than some tier 5 songs, and a number of songs are placed in the "Impossible" tier, even though only one or two instruments are difficult enough to warrant that rating (for instance, "Bodhisattva" is a tier 6 song overall, but only the guitar is that difficult. Drums are tough, but bass and vocals are nowhere near "Impossible" level).
• Nagash in Warhammer: Dark Omen. The hordes of mummies you have to negate before you get to him are indeed lethal and tiresome, but the Supreme Lord of Undead himself? Not so much. Granted, he's a superb melee fighter and a capable wizard, but you have a TANK. Crunch, oops.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • The second to last boss of Stardust Accelerator is a painful survival gauntlet where you have to fight 4 tournament caliber decks, in a row, with no resetting lifepoints and if you lose, it's game over and you have to go through a long cutscene to fight them again. These are: a Zombie deck, which by itself is tougher than anything the game has used before, a Water deck, a Lightsworn deck (an archetype of rare cards deliberately designed to be overpowered before the ban list nerfed it — this game is before that nerf — and comprised of cards so rare that it's difficult for a player to fully assemble a Lightsworn deck of their own), and a Dark Armed Dragon deck, modelled after a deck that won multiple real life tournaments. Oh and they have the computer's "luck" to help them out... After that absolute hell, you get to save, then fight the final boss... Jack Atlus, using a poorly built, unoptimised deck that is built for flavor. And it is a joke.
  • The final boss of Jaden's story in Tag Force 2 is... Jaden, using whatever deck you built for him. No special top deck hax, the not terribly good AI on his side, and those crappy, crappy E-Hero cards he's forced to use leads to an easy win.
  • CCG Importance Dissonance and lack of The Magic Poker Equation turns a lot of characters with heavy buildup in the various duel sims into this. The original series characters, Asuka, Jack (mishmash of random mediocre monsters), Saiou (gamble deck with weak effects), Cobra (extremely restricted archetype with no offensive power), Judai (horribly inconsistent experimental fusions), Aki (most of a Plant Synchro engine but little to use it on), and Rex (strategy relies on having two hard-to-summon monsters simultaneously) are particular offenders. It's even more obvious in the games that let you watch AI Duels, where these formidable enemies often struggle to handle random civilians.
  • Henry Tudor is the Climax Boss of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses's White Rose route, meaning he'll very likely be the second-last opponent in the game. Unfortunately, his deck lacks any real synergy, and is laden with very high-level monsters that slow his strategies. The field being a mishmash of terrain also means he lacks the field advantage of lesser opponents. He does have some very powerful cards, like Mirror Force, but there's no guarantee he'll draw them, and his Deck Leader has a high rank but only benefits a handful of his monsters. He also suffers from a degree of Artificial Stupidity, which is problematic when many of his cards require strategy.

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