Goddamned Boss / RPG

• Angry Birds Epic: The Poseidon Pig, if you're at a high enough level to handle it, can prove immensely tedious. It has an absurd amount of HP and a 5-hit attack which deals heavy damage, while also healing it for 100% of the damage dealt. Shielding your party with Red's Samurai class and spamming Matilda's healing abilities will negate its offensive threat, but that leaves you with just one party member with which to attack it every turn. If that bird can outdamage Poseidon Pig's healing, you'll win... if you can avoid falling asleep during the battle, that is.
• Atelier Ayesha: Here's how to defeat the final boss: stock up with items and grind it down. The battle isn't hard enough for people who enjoy a challenge, and isn't quick and easy enough for people who just want to finish the game.
• Baten Kaitos Origins:
  • The afterling under the Celestial Tree. You have to cut its roots before Valara can kill it. This is easier said than done. For one thing, the afterling inexplicably attacks Sagi's party, as opposed to the person who's trying to kill it. Also, it'll occasionally shift its posture so that your party can't hit it without killing it; with the way the game's targeting system works, however, it's possible for the thing to shift just as you attack, resulting in you unleashing an EX Combo against it and killing it. Finally, when you do cut it loose? Valara kills it in the following cutscene. This fight doesn't compare to the pain the Holoholobird put you through, but it's frustrating and the solution is counterintuitive.
  • The Hearteater you fight in the Matar Highlands. It has quite a bit of HP and hits fairly hard, but the real problem is its special, Ovulate. This infests a character with the thing's eggs, and puts a timer on them. When the timer runs out, the eggs hatch and devour the party member (read: One-Hit Kill). Basically, you can either burn up your MP using the Chalice of Freedom, or you can just revive whenever someone goes down (nigh-constantly).
  • Wiseman. His regular attacks drain both your health and your MP. Meanwhile, one of his specials, Cast Away Your Carnal Robes, knocks your whole party down, removes any magnus you've equipped, and breaks your combos. Therefore, you're gonna spend most of the fight trying to keep his HP down and struggling to assemble a decent combo, while he uses your stolen MP to hit you with special after special. Adding to the pain, he comes immediately after the brutal showdown with the Black Dragon. Thankfully, most of his attacks are fairly weak; his strongest attack, Illusory Chaos, does maybe half your health in damage, which is easy to recover from.
• One optional boss in Bravely Default Red Mage De Rosa. His actual moveset isn't too hard to deal with - a one-target physical move, Thundara to everyone, and casting Charm and Dread occasionally. What sends him into this trope is the Red Mage's signature ability, Revenge, which has a chance to give whoever has it an extra BP (basically, an extra turn) when they take damage. This is useful for you when it happens, but considering you'll probably only have one, maybe two Red Mages out at one time, it won't activate that often. But you can probably guess what happens when you give that ability to a boss you'll be attacking multiple times a turn. He'll use the extra move that gives him to immediately cast Cura, which means you have to attack him more to undo that healing, which gives him more chances to activate Revenge and do it again. If it activates enough in one turn he can tear your party apart even if everyone's at full health, which might shoot him up into That One Boss if you're particularly unlucky.
• Robin Goodfellow of Cassette Beasts has rather limited damage dealing abilities, meaning that he's unlikely to wipe out the player party quickly, but he possesses passive regeneration, a large amount of hit points, and a variety of attacks that inflict status effects (most notably "Fairy Dust" which puts the target to sleep). This results in by far the longest fight of the game, whether you win or lose.
• Chrono Cross has a Goddamned Boss Rush: the elemental robot-things in Terra Tower. They have quite a few hit points (and tend to spam healing elements at the worst times). They also love to spam status buffs and debuffs to turn the entire field to their elemental color, which sends the power of their elements through the roof. Combine this with Cross' already severe Ending Fatigue and you have a recipe for maximum annoyance.
• Lavos' Outer Shell, in Chrono Trigger. It's a Boss Rush against... well, every boss in the game (skipping a handful of sub-bosses like the R-67s and Beast Keeper). But their stats have not changed in the slightest, so you'll be one-shotting a great deal of them, meaning about 90% of the battle is waiting for Lavos to announce its next form, killing it, and waiting for the game to catch up. (The other 10% are Black Tyranno and Giga Gaia, which are still kind of tricky.) Some of his forms will also Mana Drain you upon death. You have a breather to drink some Ethers (and probably have quite a few to drink), so it's not really dangerous so much as the giant space bug giving you a big ole middle finger for no real reason other than sheer spite. Fortunately, if you choose to slam the Epoch into it, you skip this part.
  • Special mention must be made of when Lavos imitates Nizbel, as he's an enemy whose defense has to be lowered via lightning spells; otherwise, the party is lucky to be doing even double digits of damage, even with their most high-end attacks and spells. When you fight the actual boss during the game it's not a problem, as Crono, who has lightning magic, is a permanent party member until his death/resurrection, which occurs after that fight, but if you forget to bring either him or Magus along to this part of Lavos's final boss rush, you're stuck either slowly whittling down his health for half an hour, or resetting the game (or dying).
  • The Son of Sun may be this depending on your set-up. You can't attack it directly, instead you have to pick one of five targets that orbit the darned thing to damage it. Pick correctly and you inflict a set quantity of damage; pick wrong and it counter-attacks. It's completely Luck-Based which one is the right choice, and he shuffles them around regularly with no hope in hell of keeping your eye on the right choice. The intended solution is to have a fire-immune party member use a screen-filling attack to quickly figure out which one doesn't counter (and is therefore the target). Of course, if this is your first go at the fight or you don't have the equipment, it's going to take a while.
• Cthulhu Saves the World: Optional boss fight against Fallen Angel is not that hard to be outstanding. However, she has a nasty Heal All spell, which makes her regenerate 5000 HP, and due to the nature of the game, the amount of health healed increases by 500 with each turn. Therefore, her fight becomes extremely annoying and tedious, especially if you don't have any good combo finisher attacks. And don't think about driving her insane, because she'll trade her Heal All spell for Hurt All, which will more than likely insta-kill your party due to how far the difficulty had increased.
• From Dark Souls we got Lost Izalith's boss: The Bed of Chaos. You don't get to fight it directly, instead you got to rush through the arena in order to destroy 3 weak points that go down in one hit. However, as the fight progresses, the floor will crumble and the boss will start spamming hard-hitting and night-unavoidable attacks that can easily knock you down into the freshly opened Bottomless Pits. Fortunately, every time you destroy a weak point, it stays destroyed even if you die or warp back to a bonfire, which is actually a more viable strategy than trying to destroy the 3 targets in one go.
  • The Stray Demon, a Palette Swap of the Asylum Demon found in the revisited Undead Asylum. Like the Asylum Demon, his attacks are powerful, but cripplingly slow; however, unlike the Asylum Demon, many of his attacks trigger a massive magical explosion that will wreck you if you get caught in it. However, if you get the pattern down, then it just takes forever to chip down his mountain of HP.
  • The Iron Golem isn't terribly hard, but you fight him in a small arena near the top of Sen's Fortress. The biggest hazard of the fight isn't the Iron Golem's attacks, but rather the Bottomless Pit surrounding the arena. It's way too easy to fall off the edge, and while getting back to the fight isn't hard if you found the bonfire at the top of Sen's Fortress, it makes it one of the game's cheaper fights...Unless you bring in Iron TARKUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSS!!!!
  • The Capra Demon in the lower Undead Burg. His attacks with his Dual-Wielded machetes are very telegraphed and especially easy to dodge. However the boss is in a small, enclosed arena, making it hard to dodge without hitting a wall. Furthermore, he has two dogs with him, which are very fast and aggressive, cause bleed buildup, and can block you into a corner, making it even harder to dodge. The only saving grace is that there is a Cheese Strategy that allows you to kill him without entering the arena; but without that, be prepared for pain.
• The Covetous Demon from Dark Souls II is slow as is most of its attacks, has a pretty big blindspot where you'll be safe from him for the most part, is susceptible to long-distance attacks, and even has Hollows trapped inside the arena that you can free and use as bait to make him vulnerable for a short period. However, what potentially makes him count is that one of his attacks deals huge damage and unequips all your equipment except items. Enjoy eluding him while simultaneously trying to rearm yourself in the menu screen.
• Beldr in Devil Survivor, particularly on a New Game Plus. Even if you have level 99 demons armed with Megidolaon and Deathbound, you, the main character, still have to beat him to death with Devil's Fuge, which means the battle still takes many turns. Damn you Norse Mythology! While he can be quickly killed with the proper demons alongside you, his properties means you can't just one-shot him like every other early-game boss.
• Devil Survivor 2:
  • Megrez, the fourth day boss of the Septentrione Arc. It is a Time-Limit Boss, as three separate parties are fighting three Megrez pieces, but there is more than enough time to fight your piece of Megrez. Problem with this boss is, he is a scene-mandated boss, which makes this a very frustratingly stupid battle in New Game Plus. Even if the party is strong enough to defeat Megrez during one skirmish, Megrez will still retain the gameplay-mandated scenes of moving to another section of the map, heal itself half-way and needs to be fought again. And it needs to be defeated a total of four times for it to properly stick. No breezing through this battle.
  • Mizar in the Septentrione Arc is this, solely because of the premise of the battle. Mizar is about to be swallowed by the Dragon Stream, but clings with its two arms to the side of a building and the party needs to smack the arms enough, so Mizar will let go. Ignoring the factor of hitting Mizar's arms resulting in its arm spitting up two copies each time, Mizar keeps gripping onto the building and each arm needs to be defeated three times, before it will finally go down. Oh, and this is a Time-Limit Boss, too.
  • Benetnasch from the same Arc as Mizar. Benetnasch has an ability called 'Pacify Human', which means that any human party member cannot damage him, so all damage comes from the summoned demons. That is, whether fortunately or unfortunately, his most annoying ability. The problem comes from bringing Benetnasch down to red HP, at which point the second phase of the battle begins and it has split itself into four, each modeled after one of the previous Septentriones the party has already defeated days before, all with their own weaknesses. The battle isn't necessarily difficult, but is unnecessarily dragged out by this. Made even more annoying by the fact that during the battle you have to protect the Trumpeter from the Megrez buds' thunder skills (Trumpeter is unaffected by their earthquake field attacks) and cannot swap your demons.
  • Spica in Record Breaker has an Adaptive Ability, and becomes immune to any element used to destroy one of its pieces. As you will almost certainly find out during New Game Plus, this includes Almighty.
  • In the Triangulum Arc, the battle against Arcturus. Smilar to the Beldr battle in the previous game, Arcuturus can only be damaged through the normal attack of one character. Said character's attack does such pitiful damage, though, and several rounds go by, until another character arrives and assists. Arcuturus also has the ability to make everyone in your party weak to four Elements, but that can be countered by the protagonist using 'Soul Bind', to take the other party members' damage onto him. And the protagonist may not die during that battle, so keeping him safe is also a priority.
• Hari-Hara from Digital Devil Saga isn't too bad in the first form, but the second form is made ridiculous by the numerous floating cores that accompany it. Each core absorbs its respective element (making group attacks out of the question), and gets a turn of its own and will deal a single target, high level attack - so pray to Vishnu it doesn't hit a certain member's weakness if you haven't excessively prepared for this battle. Thankfully, all but one of the cores are weak to the opposing element, but if you defeat a core Hari-Hara will regenerate it or another fallen one the next turn. Oh and Hari-Hara itself likes to dish out random status ailments with Vanity, making it harder if you thought you could get lucky with Cielo in your team. Hari-Hara can also trip you up by using Hunger Wave, which can inflict the Hunger status on everyone.
  • One way of preparing for the first game's ultimate boss involves soloing most of the game as Serph. Not terrible for the most part provided you grinded to get the various Null abilities and Ragnarok, but the final fight with Bat/Camazotz is an utter pain no matter what you do. His gimmick is that he can turn you into a bat, who has reduced stats and minimal strength. And he does this frequently. Because you only have one character, you become virtually ineffective. What's worse is that the Bat status, due to being exclusive to this battle, isn't covered by Null Ailment, and to add insult to injury, the move heals Camazotz.
  • Ananta and Orochi aren't too terrible boss fights if you come prepared. The catch is that the former has seven turns and the latter has eight turns, and each attack has its own animation. While there are ways to get around this, if you don't know them, the battles will go on for a while.
• Dislyte:
  • Anesidora of Stage 12-5 is very capable of keeping an unprepared Esper group incapable of making a single move due to Pandora's Box's high chance of stunning your whole team for two turns while her squad whittles them down. The only way to make it through her is by having a support Esper dispel her debuff before it goes off, though it doesn't help much that Espers with dispelling effects are mostly Rare Espers.
  • Kronos's basic attack causes it to stomp the floor with a shockwave to hit everyone hard. Then a huge chuck of rock falls from nowhere on the party member with the lowest HP value and stuns them for a turn. On top of that, if anyone is defeated during one of its attacks (usually the one stated), it gains an extra turn that may demolish everyone else quickly.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest II:
    • Hargon likes to use Healall, which predictably makes the fight rather annoying.
    • There's also sub-boss Atlas in Hargon's castle. No frills, he just hits one party member twice per turn and hits HARD. Unless you're overleveled, getting through the fight without at least one casualty is nigh-impossible without a lucky critical hit.
  • Dragon Quest VIII: None of the bosses are very hard (in the sense of needing clever strategy) but some of them can be a long slog to beat. The Final Boss can take up to half an hour of hit the boss, hit by the boss, heal party, over and over again. With no health bar.
  • Dragon Quest IX: Shogum does on occasion summon King Cureslimes, which if you don't kill them quickly, will cast Omniheal, restoring all HP to Shogum (and the King Cureslime).
  • Dragon Quest XI: In the Tentacular boss fight, as with its tentacles intact, it can strike up to four times. Lord have mercy if you're playing with Stronger Monsters on.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: The way the battle system works, the player will run out of MP quickly unless they hit weaknesses and deal critical hits, which generates Hype and increases MP gain for the next turn. However, some bosses, such as Aphos and Zazz, have no weaknesses, making it take longer to regenerate MP. Zazz in particular has a defensive mechanic on his first form that makes him invincible for the rest of a round after he takes enough hits, making the already long battle even slower.
• Ness's Nightmare from EarthBound (1994) is a grueling Mirror Boss fought only with the main character, who knows all of said character's techniques, including one that has an off-chance of scoring a One-Hit Kill against any enemy. Which, in this case, is an immediate Game Over and a ticket back to the start of a dungeon full of awful Demonic Spiders. Given his significant amount of hit points and tendency to buff his defenses, his chances of triggering the OHKO only go up and up the longer the fight drags. Now, this will not be an issue if you equipped gear that blocks PK Flash attacks (assuming you knew this already), but this still leaves you with a highly resilient boss whose PSI attacks hit like a truck. The only solution that guarantees victory is, simply, to outlast him until he finally runs out of PP. It'll take a while.
• The final boss of the official The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind plug-in Siege at Firemoth (Grum) has 2000 hp with a regeneration effect. For comparison, the final boss of the first expansion pack (Tribunal) is a legitimate Physical God with 3000 HP and the second expansion's (Bloodmoon) is an aspect of a god with 2000 HP, and neither possesses regeneration. Grum's attacks aren't anything special, and if you have decent Resist Shock effects, he is almost incapable of harming you. That said, he still takes forever to kill.
• Most bosses in Endless Frontier. All of them (and there are a crapton) have lots of team-hitting attacks, Forced Evasion, some really tough flunkies and enough HP to eclipse Bill Gate's total income four times over. Granted, so do normal enemies, but not to the ferocity bosses do. Expect to spend a solid half-hour fighting a single boss.
• Cro-Maine, one of the later bosses in E.V.O.: Search for Eden, is the bane of anyone who plays this game. Not only does his attack do high damage and has a huge swing radius, but one hit sends you clear out of the boss arena and forces you to start all over. Note that his health is fully restored but yours isn't. Unlike every other boss in the game, where there is always an evolution to give you an edge, your only hope against Cro-Maine is to carefully time your attacks so you can dodge his club and chip away at his health, and one slip up sends you all the way back to the start of the fight.
• Every boss from the Golden Sun games with some kind of Djinn screw either counts as That One Boss or this. Notable are the bosses capable of using Crucible, which unleash a Summon using your own standby Djinni, meaning you lose both the Djinn stat boost, the chance to use that summon AND take a ton of damage. Fortunately the most glaring example (Dullahan) has a fixed pattern with its attacks, so much that with some planning he will use a level 1 Summon and deal almost no damage.
• Dopplegangers in the .hack//G.U. Games spawn if the player stands still for too long in a field and will begin slowly chasing the player, even being capable of breaking into the battle fence of another encounter. The Doppleganger's abilities are identical to Haseo, but eight levels stronger. Because of the game's damage scaling, this means that attacks will do chip damage unless you use Beast Awakening, which negates the scaling while active but only lasts for a short time, meaning the player must recharge the gauge using Favorite Actions to damage the Doppleganger again before it can regenerate. Or reach the level cap before you fight it, because it's affected by it just like you are. Defeating the Doppleganger once in the first volume, twice in the second, and once again in the postgame of the third will reward the player with Game-Breaker equipment for the second and third volumes.
  • The Sealed Beasts in the second and third volumes only have a tiny number of attacks, but large amounts of HP, and upon falling below around 1000 HP they will spam Ma Repth until over about 2000. Defeating them requires bringing them down to just above the threshold at which they heal and then finishing them off in one shot with Divine Awakening.
• Jade Empire gives you Death's Hand. Despite being implied to be the Big Bad for a good half of the game, the fight against him consists almost entirely of hammering him with repeated blows, then dodging his massive but cripplingly slow attacks. He was immune to stun and most status effects, so all you could really do was wait for his HP (or your sanity) to run out.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The 7th Stand User has any boss that can change their distance to ?. This can make otherwise easy bosses like Forever and High Priestess (or an already hard boss like Chaka) take quite a while, because they take 1 point of damage if you're lucky from any attack at this distance, and usually "rest out of sight" to regain HP. They can stay at this distance for as long as the AI feels like, and the fight is basically at a standstill until they return to their regular distance.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Ursula's first form is probably the first game's standout example. She constantly guards, is aided by her eels (who constantly declare "No escape!"), and can only be attacked by overflowing her cauldron with magic—but the game doesn’t do a good job at explaining exactly how that works.
  • The final boss of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories' Reverse/Rebirth mode, Ansem, is like this. The entire fight basically consists of using card break duels, and he has the maximum HP possible in the game. Very tedious.
    • The final boss of the main story mode in Chain of Memories also counts, thanks to having a set pattern of very easily-avoided attacks, and giving you plenty of time to heal if you do get hit, but only being vulnerable at one small time window during that pattern (and having the maximum amount of health possible in the game).
  • Ruler of the Sky from Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days isn't particularly difficult. Its pattern is pretty basic, and its attacks don't hit that hard. However it has high life and the entire battle is spent in the air where it will outrun you. This all adds up to a VERY long boss battle.
    • Zip Slasher in particular is like this, but because of the inferior AI and battle system, lots of the enemies in this game qualify. Devastating attacks, but just falls to the same pattern spammed over and over again, but you have to keep doing it and if you mess up, you do it all over again.
  • Ventus' final boss, Vanitas, in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has a unique section right at the end where you have to finish him off with a D-Link. The problem is that the game doesn't make it entirely clear that you're supposed to fill the finisher bar before hitting him with said finisher. Ignoring that the bar goes up slowly and empties quickly when you aren't attacking him, you can't block or heal, making this battle an infuriating race against the clock before Vanitas kills you. The worst part? If you do eventually fire off a finisher, but aren't positioned just right, it will miss and force you to fill up the gauge again. More often than not, you die soon after.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC has the second fight with Lorence, who has lower damage output than before but makes up for it with more defensive tactics. Thanks to his insane SPD, he can easily spam Tearal and Earth Guard EX to keep himself alive and save up enough CP for his S-Craft, ad nauseam. His skillset also covers at least three status effects, which means anyone who doesn't have Grail Locket will be vulnerable to at least one effect. This makes for a tedious and somewhat luck-based battle, especially on Nightmare difficulty.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero: The final boss has two major and two minor problems, but is otherwise a standard damage sponge:
  • He spams the Confuse status effect. This is easily blocked by accessories, but you probably won't have the whole party wearing the right accessories before the fight. Hope you have a recent save!
  • After he's taken enough damage, he makes parts of the battlefield sink. If the whole party are standing on the wrong spot, it's game over. Hope you have a recent save!
  • You can skip your attack animations, but not those of enemies. One of the boss's attacks has a very long animation, but at least he doesn't use it very often.
  • There is a long cutscene before the fight. This is unskippable, but it can be fast-forwarded.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel:
  • Cold Steel III has Magic Knight Azura-Luciel, which is fought in a side quest in the Heimdallr Underground. Its health pool and damage output are nothing special for a boss, BUT, it constantly interrupts your spell casters, which makes it hard to do a lot of damage. It constantly heals itself, sometimes for over 15,000 HP. When it heals itself it usually resets the Break Meter, which, again, makes it hard to do a lot of damage. If you don't know the correct strategy, then this fight can take over half an hour.
  • Cold Steel IV has the Steel Maiden. Huge HP pool? Check. Interrupts your spell casters? Check. The fight isn't hard if you can keep a damage-reducing Brave Order running, it's just a long, dull slog. And when you've beaten her, she gets up and starts piloting the mech that was parked at the back of the battlefield. This second stage is at least much shorter than the first stage.
• The boss on the DLC of Lost Odyssey, Killalon, is incredibly irritating. For starters you have to run down 25 floors of dungeon before you can fight him, with no save points. Although he doesn't have that much HP, the fact that he regens it a lot makes him hard to kill, and as you near-constantly have to protect your characters from his moves any damage you do will likely be recovered. Even with 5 level 99 characters and the best skills in the game, defeating this boss is somewhat reliant on what moves he actually decides to cast.
• Live A Live has The Bountiful Heart. The boss is overall not all that difficult, but has an annoying attack called Sweet Whisper, which a previous boss had, and send the character to sleep. Aside from that attack, though, it's a pretty standard hit-it-a-lot boss, but becomes obnoxious, as he has to be fought repeatedly in the dungeon it appears in.
• In Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story, Challenge Tower Floor 34 of the timed event "Spurred to Separation" ("Breakpoint" in North America) has you fighting 9 Madoka-senpais. They don't have much HP and don't hit particularly hard (with the exception of her Magia which can one hit kill Dark Magical Girls), but there's 9 of them and all of them cast Taunt every turn, making your attacks go everywhere. If you don't blast them with Magia immediately, prepare to fight a long annoying battle against all of them.
• The Mario & Luigi series has a few. Due to the series's dodging mechanics, where almost every enemy's attacks can be completely dodged or countered, bosses that would otherwise end up as That One Boss can fit here instead.
  • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time's final boss marathon. The final boss alone has two phases, obscene health, heals every few turns, has a weak point that can only be attacked after destroying two other weak points, and they regenerate too, it attacks multiple times per turn and deals high damage: a true evening-filling final boss. These bosses are the reason the Game-Breaker Ulti-Free Badge is worth getting: unlimited Bros. Attacks for one Bro is the only way to make relatively quick work of them. The final bosses mercifully had their health nerfed in the Japanese and European versions, making them take less time to beat.
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: Fawful is not a particularly hard boss, but only 2 of his attacks can be countered, and he can heal himself with his vacuum helmet. As a result, most of the fight is simply waiting until the helmet separates itself from Fawful, after which it must be inhaled so Mario and Luigi can destroy it. Fortunately, Bowser is able to attack the helmet directly with some of his Special Attacks, which speeds up the process.
  • The Elite Trio in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. Why? Because you have to take them all down in one attack, otherwise the ones left standing revive their fallen comrades. Or in other words, you basically have to win either with a Luiginary attack or by perfectly countering one of their stronger attacks (or maybe a certain badge effect), since anything else won't hit a wide enough area to take down all three simultaneously. Since they get three actions per turn and you only get one, it can also take a while before you get to act again in this fight.
  • Additionally, some of the Hooraws fought in Dreamy Wakeport before Big Massif are this, since they're not hard in the traditional sense and don't have particularly powerful attacks, they just have a battle "rule" that makes it annoying. Heavy Zest in particular has to be defeated in three turns (along with and all his minions), which is rather annoying since you don't have any Luiginary attacks more powerful than Luiginary Ball and Luiginary Stack.
• Bosses in Marvel Ultimate Alliance games aren't particularly hard in and of themselves. Unfortunately, these bosses do nothing but spam attacks that knock your heroes all around the room and interrupt your attacks. Plus, while they can knock you all over the place, they themselves are completely immune to Trip, Stun, Popup, and Grappling. This reaches head against wall levels when you find that a party full of Mighty Glaciers and Flying Bricks can be kicked around by minor villains whom they should realistically be able to one-shot. Basically, every boss fight slaps your entire team of superheroes with The Worf Effect. This was slightly improved in the second game, which gave larger characters like the Thing and the Hulk "knockback resistance," so they could no longer be Punched Across the Room.
• Mass Effect 2 has the Thresher Maw. It only has one attack- firing blasts of acid at you, and there are no other enemies to fight, but the battle can be very frustrating because A) it has a ton of health, B) the Thresher can destroy some of the cover around you and frequently shifts position on the battlefield forcing you to constantly be on the move, C) it uses its acid blast attack frequently and said attack rips through your shields like a knife through butter, and D) you're on a 5 minute time limit the whole fight. However, despite the fact that running out of time doesn't cause you to lose, if you don't beat the Thresher by then you won't get the best reward, not to mention that destroying it is an In-Universe Moment of Awesome.
• Mega Man Battle Network: Common features of this trope among bosses include hiding out in the back row, having plenty of moments where they cannot be damaged (barring an Armor-Piercing Attack), and having movment patterns that make them hard to hit.
  • ToadMan in the second game is made difficult through his incredibly obnoxious attack pattern. You will constantly have to dodge the tadpole torpedoes fired by his lily pads, often dodging the paralyzing song note that Toad will fire at you (which can shift rows to home in on you), and if ToadMan catches you in his row, he'll spring over to his other lily pad, two rows above or below him, requiring you to chase him.
  • SnakeMan (also in the second game) loves to hide in his pot if anyone ever enters his row, defending himself from damage and wasting everybody's time, and he moves so fast that any non-instantaneous attacks would just be wasted. That he hangs out in the back row behind a column of holes is icing on the cake.
  • BubbleMan from 3 constantly hides from your attacks behind a rock and a constant stream of bubble traps. When he falls to low HP and goes on the actual offensive, he also protects himself with a fragile but regenerating bubble barrier. Oh, and his Beta random encounter will only appear when you're at critical health.
  • DrillMan of the third game is lacking in HP, but makes up for it by being extremely hard to hit. He constantly dives across the battlefield, accompanied by drills on the rows he's not flying down, so it's often a guessing game as to which row he will be on next. He himself is also attached to the drill he's propelling, which blocks all frontal attacks.
  • GutsMan may have been a Warmup Boss in the previous 2 games, but in Battle Network 3 he becomes a fair bit more challenging past his first fight. He moves a little more erratically, starts carrying Area Grabs to regain ground, gains Super Armor, and his Beta version holds a Program Advance as a Desperation Attack if not defeated quickly enough. If you see that last attack, kiss your S-rank goodbye as it lasts several seconds and you cannot damage him in the meantime.
  • DarkMan in the third game deploys a series of bats through Mega's field that require constant dodging back and forth to avoid damage. These are a distraction from his Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors nightmare — he has 3 out of 4 elements under his control, and an attack (usually an area-consuming one, like the Killer's Eye ray or the two-row snowflake) will trigger every time you cross his path, which is what the BATS are for.
  • SparkMan of the fourth game constantly blips in and out of the battlefield, and for the brief moments when he does show up, he may lauch a bomb forward that also intercepts frontal attacks. If he's lined up as an opponent in your first playthrough where your collection is not well-developed, he can become an exercise in frustration.
  • ShadeMan always has some obnoxious damage-mitigating trick in the fourth game. In his first two plot-based fights, he can't take any damage at all without Dark Chips, but special consideration must go to his Omega version random-encounter, after the Boktai sidequest. He can take damage, but if you hit him too hard, he'll split into four red bats that slowly retreat from the field, three of which are illusory. If you want to beat him quickly, you must figure out which one of the bats is really him and continue to pile on the attacks (and his HP counter disappears during this too)...but it's only safe to hit him while he's in the lowest row of the field, since you want to protect the Green Mystery Data^note There's a version-specific Giga Chip inside, and the only other way to find it is by picking a fight with LaserMan Omega in the upper corner of his field (which the ShadeMan-bat will destroy if he connects with it). Have fun.
  • DiveMan in the sixth game spends the majority of time under the battlefield, where he can only be hit by Cursor chips or panel-affecting attacks. While he's under"water", he spawns missiles in two rows at a time, and only resurfaces either to immediately dip down again, or to launch an attack. While his strongest attack doesn't hit the back row, he also can launch bombs and the aforementioned missiles at you to get you into range of it. It's a drawn-out fight, regardless of his version.
• Silver Horn in Mega Man X: Command Mission. Originally, the fight isn't too bad, and Horn has an exploitable weakness to electric attacks. But when he's at half health, he uses Liquid Coating, which raises his defenses exponentially, even to his weakness, making the fight incredibly tedious.
• Octopath Traveler: The final boss of Primrose's story doesn't hit as hard as other bosses. The main difficulty of the fight is the fact that the boss will inflict Silence on your party every time he recovers from a Break, crippling your party unless you have accessories that protect you from it. Also, he will obscure the turn interface towards the middle of the fight, so you will not know when your characters will act.^note Thankfully, it does not obscure his own turn icon. Overall, it is a boss that is way more annoying than hard.
• Odin Sphere: The Crystallization Cauldron. It's a massive Damage-Sponge Boss that requires you to take out the eye first in order to expose its weak point. You have a limited amount of time to throw as much damage as you can on said weak point before it retracts, and every time it appears, mooks are spawned that you'll have to take out as well if you don't want to get shot to death or stunned while wailing on the weak point. That and a recurring attack that requires you to stop what you're doing, hop off, and wait for it to finish means this is a boss that takes a long time to kill. And in order to get the best ending of the game, you have to fight it with Velvet, who's the Low-Tier Letdown in the original game, and whose talents in the remake aren't really useful against it.
  • A particular example, the Mandarin, requires the player to guide an exploding spider robot into a very specific location to make the boss temporarily vulnerable. You're more likely to die from the spiders exploding before you get them to the spot than you are from anything the boss can throw at you.
• In the Paper Mario series:
  • Paper Mario 64:
    • Jr. Troopa. He has higher defense than most enemies to begin with, and gains a new immunity with each battle. And this being a game where you only have three or four modes of attack, that's a big deal. Your only options are to spam certain partners' attacks — and the more effective ones tend to cost a ton of Flower Points — or to come into the fights (which are all totally unannounced) specially equipped.
    • Big Lantern Ghost. You fight it in a dark room, where you can't target any enemy unless you can see it; the only enemy you can see is its lantern, which you must hit at least twice so that you can attack the Ghost in the first place. Except that it blows out the lantern on a regular basis, forcing you to keep. doing. this. Making matters worse is that one of its attacks hits your partner (which forces you to miss their turn for multiple turns at a time) and is nigh-impossible to guard against with your Action Commands except by pure dumb luck. And speaking of Action Commands and pure dumb luck, the battle routinely lags if you're playing the Virtual Console release of the game, making even basic timed hits obnoxiously difficult and the battle much harder than it needs to be.
  • Super Paper Mario:
    • Francis turns invisible with his Chameleon Camouflage and attacks by licking with his tongue and summoning Action Bombs, which aren't too threatening on their own. But Francis is only vulnerable for the short window of time he reveals himself, and while you can see his shadow by flipping into 3D, 3D mode locks your camera to face right, meaning you can't see if he's behind you.
    • King Croacus is guarded most of the time by his armor, has spinning flower petal blades the size of Bowser cycling (albeit rather slowly) through the arena, and is somewhat difficult to hit. He's not hard, he has relatively low HP, and is easier once you figure out that you can grab the giant spinning blades and throw them at him (which is a little unintuitive, since that's the sort of thing you tend to avoid in games).
    • Mimi is relatively easy to defeat; the problem is that to beat her, you have to hit her with the jewels she throws at you, knocking her partially off the ceiling, and unfortunately, it's pretty easy to misjudge the jump to Goomba Stomp her, and end up crashing into her, hurting you instead.
  • Paper Mario: Sticker Star: While Tower Power Pokey isn't a particularly hard boss when equipped with the Bat Thing, two factors make it one of the most annoying bosses in the entire Mario series. One, it's a Damage-Sponge Boss, so even when its HP has been sliced apart by the Bat Thing, Tower Power Pokey will still take a while before it fully goes down. Two, the fight runs on Violation of Common Sense, as while Pokeys are normally immune to jump attacks and have to be struck with a hammer, Tower Power Pokey is weak to jump attacks and resists hammer attacks, leading to it being one of the most confusingly-designed bosses in the series.
• Persona 2: Eternal Punishment has Captain Shimazu. Shimazu and his flunkies aren't too tough aside from the insta-kill Aimed-shot with all of their damage-dealing attacks being single-target, the problem comes with dealing damage as they will constantly spam Hypnotic wave, a party-spanning sleep-inducing spell ad nauseam, ruining your Fusion-spells.
• Persona 3 has bosses that fall under this. In particular, while several Tartarus Guardians are That One Bosses, most of the Full Moon Shadows aren't particularly difficult, especially if you're playing the significantly easier Portable version, but these bosses are listed as this due to their annoying boss fight stipulatuons and gimmicks.
  • Priestess is an utter cakewalk compared to the next ten Full Moon bosses due to her low HP and not having elemental skills besides Ice but to compensate for the boss fight's overall difficulty, you only have less than eight minutes to kill her before the monorail your party is in crashes to the other one. She would also summon beefed up versions of Muttering Tiaras to act as her flunkies as well as casting Pulinpa and Marin Karin to stall you and prolong the boss fight. Her Reload version is a little easier, albeit a little more annoying: while the boss fight starts with thirty minutes instead of eight or less, she now has Ice Storm (her version of Mabufula) and can shorten the time limit with Invitation to Chaos.
  • Empress and Emperor, the first Dual Boss in the game, are far less difficult to deal with due to having multiple weaknesses, and would've been flattened in a few turns if it weren't for the fact that they can block other elements (physical attacks included). Their Signature Move, Paradigm Shift, makes them invulnerable to all but one element, forcing you to use Fuuka's Full Analysis to exploit their changing resistances and weaknesses as a result. Additonally, Yukari won't be available for this boss fight due to Gameplay and Story Segregation, and Empress can get One Mores from hitting Junpei with Magaru(la). They're also beefed up significantly in Reload, as Empress includes more second-tier elemental skills in her moveset, and Emperor has heavy-hitting Slash skills such as Getsu-ei and Tempest Slash.
  • Chariot and Justice are both this and That One Boss due to their ever-annoying Dual Boss staple: if they aren't both killed in the same turn, one will revive the other with full HP. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for your party members being AI controlled, so its hard to stop them accidentally triggering the revival. Thankfully though, Portable lessens the difficulty by adding the "Direct Commands" tactic from the fourth game, though they're still no pushovers due to Chariot having three status ailment skills and Justice having the One-Hit Kill Hama.
  • Fortune and Strength have one unique feature each: Fortune's Signature Move, Wheel of Fortune, can damage, heal, buff/debuff, or inflict status ailments to either them or your party. Strength on the other hand, casts a special spell that makes Fortune invulnerable until she's killed off. Fighting Fortune and Strength is basically a Luck-Based Mission, though unlike the other bosses you've fought, as soon as you've inflicted Fear on them through Wheel of Fortune, you can end the boss fight immediately by casting Ghastly Wail to finish them off in one-shot.
  • Hanged Man, the last Full Moon Shadow, is not that tough compared to the above Fortune and Strength. Sure, while he does have Akasha Arts and God's Hand, both of which are high-end Strike skills, he doesn't have any elemental spells. That said, he's capable of summoning, and then sacrificing a Devious Maya for his own version of Megidola. Additionally, he can make himself invulnerable by summoning three Statues (which can cast Agilao, Bufula, and Zionga respectively) to serve as his meat shields, though destroying all three of them would cause him to fall and knocked down for an All-Out Attack. And finally, he has more health than the previous bosses you've fought, especially if you've fought his Vision Quest version in Portable, who has thrice the amount of the Final Boss' health.
  • The Fanatic Tower, a Tartarus guardian, isn't particularly threatening if you have a Persona who is not weak to Electricity and/or has Null Poison, but it has no weaknesses and is immune to all attacks except Strike and Wind. And even those two aren't fully effective: it's packing Mind Charge, Dodge Strike to make your Strike attacks unreliable, and has (Ma)Zionga to hit Yukari and Aigis' weaknesses.
• While the bosses of Persona 4 just as tough as the bosses of the previous game, Golden turns several of them into this:
  • Shadow Yukiko in Golden is now weak to Ice and would sometimes waste her turn by "passionately staring" at the party before attacking or using a skill. At the same time, she has White Wall and her summoned unit, Charming Prince (who is now weak to Electricity this time), has Makajam.
  • Also in Golden, Shadow Kanji is this. On his own, he's not that hard, but he has White Wall and Revolution, can drain Electricity, and his flunkies are more problematic than him: While both of them can't absorb Physical attacks and are weak to Fire and Ice respectively, Nice Guy has Re Patra and Red Wall, and Tough Guy's HP is bumped up to 2500.
  • Shadow Mitsuo takes forever to kill, constantly giving himself a 1400 HP buffer that's basically unstoppable. Beyond his AI randomly getting lucky and using both of his actions to finish off Yu (instant game over if he dies), he poses no threat but is a war of attrition.
  • Ameno-Sagiri is significantly less threatening than the previous boss Kunino-Sagiri. However, he has high-tier elemental spells as well as Dekaja and Dekunda, can make himself invulnerable (status debuffs and Almighty included) with Bewildering Fog to buy himself time by casting Mind Charge, Tarukaja, and Sukukaja in quick succession, and his full-powered Nebula Oculus attack deals tons of damage to the party. Fighting him in Golden is way more annoying due to your party retaining their innate weaknesses after maxing out their Social Links and in both versions, unlike in Shadow Teddie's case, there are no SP refills after beating Adachi.
  • Kusumi-no-Okami (aka Marie) is far simpler to beat compared to the bosses you've previously fought. She can deflect all attacks but Almighty (rendering Physical skill-users like Chie and Kanji deadweights for this boss fight) but despite this, she has a Cast from Hit Points spell that drains 50 SP from your party and you can easily steamroll her if you have enough SP restoring items, element-nullifying skills/items, and Repel Joue armors.
• Shot Mothers in Phantasy Star Zero. They appear randomly every 10 floors in a bonus dungeon with 101 floors, and you cant leave to tower for more items. She isn't strong by any means, but her annoying attack pattern of gliding across the room coupled with the lack of items makes her a very annoying fight.
• Rogue Galaxy has this boss battle around chapter 6: first you must get into a mine and fight a drilling-mining-robot-thing, which is painstakingly slow to defeat since you have to finish off each arm first. After that, he just keeps running around and hitting you with a drill that comes straight out of his...well, you get it. After a very LONG battle, you find out that it was not the end and you still have to fight the guy controlling it. With the newest member of your party alone (whom, of course you're barely accustomed to play). To make it even worse, said enemy can kill you in a few shots and moves way faster than you can, and the only real way to kill him is to keep blocking until he reloads, making the battle take a long time even when you know what you're supposed to do. Since blocking isn't that useful for most of the game, there are high chances you will lose; fortunately, there's the possibility to save your game before but, guess what? There is NO SAVING POINT between the previous battle and this one so if you happen to lose (which is most probable) you'll have to deal with the drilling-ass robot again. Alluring, isn't it?
• Tortigar in Skies of Arcadia. He only has two attacks, a normal attack and a hit-all attack, neither of which are particularly damaging. However, he has rather high health, tends to spend every other turn making himself invincible, and has the ability to fully heal all of his health and WILL do so at least once every time you fight him. The main strategies for beating him are either spamming Spirit moves and hoping he isn't invincible/healing himself on that turn, or saving up your Spirit bar to its maximum, using one of your Limit Break techniques that make your enemy skip a turn, and hope he doesn't heal himself during the two or three turns you're recharging.
• Many of the bosses in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed can be these if you're having an off day. They end with mandatory Action Command challenges, and if you keep screwing them up, you'll wish you could just give 'em a basic slash and call it a day. Same deal with Spider-Man: Web of Shadows. The Gorog in the sequel to the Force Unleashed can be a Marathon Boss with repetitive mechanics.
• The higher difficulty levels in Tales of Xillia turn every boss into these because of HP bloat (enemy HP on hard is 250% of its value on easy, and enemies take about a third less damage too, while only dealing about 50% more), but the two bosses who can heal, Agria and Gaius/Muzet really take the cake. Their healing powers increase proportional to their health, not their attack power, meaning that Agria can instantaneously recover 15,000 HP at a point in the game when your strongest mystic arte can do maybe half that. And they can spam these moves an unlimited number of times, and quickly enough that if the AI decides to be mean it can recover from critical to full in 5-10 seconds while still attacking occasionally. This can render these fights nearly unwinnable even for a player with enough levels, equipment, and gaming skill to render their offense trivial. Better hope you brought a *lot* of hourglasses.
• Tales of Xillia 2: Muzét (Fractured) about halfway through the game. She has some pretty tough spells and she is the first boss to actually use a Mystic Arte on regular difficulty. Aside from having some annoying spells like Air Pressure or Flame Ring, Muzét loves to teleport around the field. If she's cornered, she teleports away and blasts you with more spells. Fortunately, the player did get Milla into their party shortly before and her Link Ability is to bind an enemy, which can keep Muzét in place for a bit.
• Touhou Project Pocket EVO+ "story fights" generally consist of one of your characters against a single opposing character. Sometimes this is otherwise a perfectly normal fight. Sometimes the opposing character has a Defense-increasing or healing spell card and will not stop spamming it. That is mainly because healing spells in this game heal a set percentage of max HP. Given bosses' sick amounts of health, even one usage of it can remedy whatever you did during the last five turns. And thanks to the game's spellcard system (using a spellcard disables it until you decide to use your turn to restore it), they can use it every second turn. EVO+'s UFO system makes it even worse - if the enemy gets a green UFO, you have to take it out with a successful attack - if you don't, she regains 20% of her HP at the end of current turn. So if the RNG is not on your side...
• Both of the truly optional bosses in Wasteland - the Scorpitron and the Nightmare. Since the Scorpitron is available for you to fight basically from game's beginning, he doubles as That One Boss for most players because he's a big challenge even for a party that just finished the game (but didn't spend much time on leveling up). The Nightmare, however, resides in an optional dungeon, and you don't have to fight him to complete it. He isn't particularly dangerous, he just has the highest HP in the entire game and you can only have one party member enter the dungeon to begin with, which makes his fight long and tedious (if not for macros and the fast-forward button). This can also lead to Can't Catch Up, since he also gives the highest XP in the game for killing him (and double that if the final blow is done via melee) which can easily earn your solo character a level or three.
• Wild ARMs 3: Arioch, The Duke of Vengeance. True to the name, he's very easy to beat when you encounter him the first time, but afterward, he will, emphasis on will, stalk you. Meaning that every random encounter will have a chance of you encountering Arioch. The mechanics is that Arioch starts as a level 1 boss. His level goes up every time an encounter happens. So, assuming the player's level is constant and is around lvl 70 when he/she triggers Arioch, about first 30-40 encounters will be cakewalk, the rest to 70th medium, and in the last 10 encounters: painful.
• Cornix Canor in The World Ends with You. A Get Back Here Flunky Boss who picks up battlefield obstacles, screwing with your psychokinesis (and sometimes your shockwave, depending on the angle). Its flunkies are seemingly only there to give Neku something to do, while blocking Shiki's attempts to actually hit the boss itself. It's rather fitting that this boss is the one chosen to, in-universe, waste Neku's time.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The fight with the Phantasms in chapter 7 isn't particularly dangerous; a properly leveled party won't really be in any danger of dying. The problem is that there are a lot of phantasms, and each one is capable of summoning another phantasm when low on health, which in turn can summon another phantasm, meaning that the battle is going to drag out for a long time unless you manage to wipe them all out simultaneously. Unfortunately, doing so is nigh-impossible because the fight occurs in a dungeon that prevents you from using your most powerful attacks. Eventually they stop respawning, but you'll spend loads of time killing them before you reach that point. It doesn't help they often spam the same two attacks ad nauseam.

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