Boss Games come in three flavors:
- Primarily Bosses: An original game with a main focus on fighting bosses: There may be "fodder" enemies (or at least pauses) between each fight, but those segments are easy and very short.
- Entirely Bosses: The entire game is one continuous battle against a single opponent, usually one who changes depending on the performance of the player. These games tend to be rather short but intense, and are almost always 2D Shoot 'em Ups.
- Boss Remix: A "special" edition/port/hack/Arrange Mode of a normal game with everything except the bosses removed, similar to a Boss Rush.
Examples:
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Primarily Bosses
- Alien Soldier. There are more bosses than levels if you count each form of Seven Force separately, and it held the previous world record for "Most boss battles in a run and gun game" with 25; for the current record holder, see Cuphead below.
- The Aquatic Adventure Of The Last Human is a Metroidvania with only minor obstacles between bosses.
- Banana Nababa is a throwback to 8-bit, Nintendo Hard bosses. Mercifully, if you die you only have to repeat the boss you died on and not lose your entire progress.
- Battle Clash and its sequel are light gun games that consist entirely of boss battles with Humongous Mecha.
- Bendy in Nightmare Run has one boss per "episode," fought in multiple acts. In each act, there are also mooks and gauntlet sections.
- Big Karnak have mooks in the first three stages, but halfway through it begins throwing bosses almost non-stop, with less than ten seconds between each boss.
- Blood Will Tell consists majorly of boss fights, given the game's Gotta Kill 'Em All nature to collect various body parts from the bosses.
- Bomberman Quest. Every enemy is a miniboss with some HP, different attacks, weaknesses, and a battle theme playing while they're not yet defeated.
- The flash game Bosses!. (One of them is Mega Man (Classic) in all but name, and you in fact play as a Mega Man Expy with the same attacks.)
- BOSSGAME: The Final Boss Is My Heart, as indicated by the title, is a series of fights against unique opponents intercut with a story told through dialogue about the main characters, lesbian lovers Sophie and Anne, finding out the truth about their demon-hunting job and then overcoming their differences to fight for the right cause. Every fight can be rechallenged after victory, with the game keeping track of your fastest time.
- Boss Rush Mythology, a game where you have to face twenty bosses on various mythologies.
- The flash game Boss Slayer consists of fighting 10 giant alien spaceships and no other enemies. There aren't even breaks inbetween each fight.
- Buzz Lightyear of Star Command is a Licensed Game released in the early 2000s for PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and PC (all ports are essentially the same but for control differences) which is a third person shooter with a twist: You're chasing and, if possible, outrunning the boss into an arena where boss fight happens. If you made it to the arena before the boss, then the boss fight will be made easier as one of Buzz's sidekick weakens the boss.
- Castlevania Fighter, a homebrewed game developed using M.U.G.E.N, is a humongous boss rush where you choose a character, choose a difficulty level, then take on just about every meaningful boss from the series that has a sprite which wouldn't clash with those of SotN-styled characters. Oh, and most of them have even more attacks than they did in their original games.
- Chaos Field. The original game consists entirely of boss battles, while the Expanded mode in the GameCube version has waves of cannon fodder enemies between bosses.
- Chippy is a Bullet Hell twinstick shooter where you shoot and take apart a variety of multi-form Cores-and-Turrets Bosses.
- Clean Asia: Two of the three stages are a sequence of bosses, and are timed. The other stage plays like a normal vertical shooter, finishing in a boss fight (but no completion time is given).
- Contra:
- Contra: Hard Corps is basically all bosses.
- Contra: Shattered Soldier is largely just boss after boss. There are generic mooks to be killed here and there, but largely they are just fodder on your way to the next boss and should provide zero threat. Notably, they do not contribute to the completion percentage for each level.
- Creature Shock is an Interactive Movie example of this. After the Rail Shooter opening, the whole game consists of a simplistic adventure game broken up by light-gun fights against alien creatures, all of them completely unique.
- Cuphead is a run-and-gun game centering around boss fights, with each one being a Sequential Boss. In the base game, there are 19 unique boss levels, one of which has ten sub-bosses, making for a total of 28. The DLC adds 12 additional bosses, bringing the total up to 40. The game currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most bosses in a run-and-gun game. None of these bosses have a level before them, and their battle locations are placed on the world maps instead, but there are six side-scrolling levels which are nothing but fighting mooks and platforming (though a couple of them have a Mini-Boss at some point in the stage).
- Death Brade (a.k.a. Mutant Fighter), the spiritual sequel to Hippodrome, was a fantasy fighting tournament with a total of nine stages, each in its own unique arena (it also had a one-off versus mode). Playing with two players would cause the opponent to appear twice except for the Golem, Hydra, Demon, and Archmage (very unusual in the Golem's case because it was a normal selectable character unlike the other three). Running out of energy or time resulted in defeat, but if the player continued, all damage to the enemy remained (and the clock was fully reset), so this was more a wrestling-centric beat-'em-up than a fighting game.
- Death Duel 1992. Notable because it's an early Light Gun Game (... without the light gun).
- Downplayed in Divinity: Original Sin II, which has a lot of non-boss enemies — but not a single mooks encounter. Since it has no Random Encounters, every combat is a hand-crafted event designed specifically to challenge players, in which every enemy (even non-boss one) is either just as dangerous as a Player Party member, or has a nasty trick up its sleeve that is hard to counter, even on regular difficulty. The end result that you have to approach every single fight like you would a boss battle in any other RPG.note
- A puzzle game that qualifies is Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine where the player (who has no character in the game to represent him) has to go through a gauntlet against Dr. Robotnik's robotic minions in order to save a city of sentient Beans. Each of the enemies face appears to scowl, gloat or snivel, in a window in the middle of the screen.
- Eldest Souls is a Souls-like RPG boss-rush game where you are sent to ancient prison called the Citadel to slay all the Old Gods. Each time you kill a God, you gain their power and use it on others.
- Endless Frontier and its sequel may be considered this. The mooks are mostly weak and easy to go through, while bosses take a while and there's tons of them (and often you face them twice). The sequel even has hunting a bunch of Optional Bosses as a Side Quest.
- Epic Boss Fighter and its sequel. Every level of either game is a separate boss fight, and you move on to the next boss as soon as you defeat the previous one.
- The songs that Everhood’s gameplay revolves around all take place in combat against another character. Only a couple minigames, the incinerator and an obstacle course do not involve a boss.
- EverQuest II, especially when it comes to the raid dungeons, has been getting steadily more like this.
- Evolve. There are smaller Mooks in each level and one huge monster as the boss- killing it allows the hunters to win. The catch is that the boss itself is playable.
- Every Fighting Game is this. This is especially noticeable with older games like the original Street Fighter or the first Fatal Fury, which had a much more limited choice of player characters. The first Fatal Fury was very obviously an action game with a fighting game setup (one punch, kick, and throw button, clear demarcation between the heroes and the enemies, 2-against-1 mode).
- Find Mii or StreetPass Quest. The whole game is nothing but fights against either enemies, mini bosses or bosses, there's never any walking or travelling around involved.
- Forbidden Forest and Beyond Forbidden Forest
for the Commodore 64. A relatively short game which is more or less a Boss Game, the second more so than the first. Notable for the fact that you play as a Bounty Hunter who's been paid to make a hit on a god. Yowza.
- Fraxy. You have a choice of either choosing what boss you wish to fight, or letting the game choose for you. Be warned, however, that the game will sometimes pit you against That One Boss.
- Furi alternates between fighting bosses in a hack and slash bullet hell hybrid and walking to the next boss while you get some exposition.
- Gundemonium (Recollection) and GundeadliGne
- Data East's Hippodrome pitted a sword-wielding gladiator against a series of exotic opponents, each with a unique fighting style. The other player could jump in at any time for a versus contest. Stylistically this resembled a cross between Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Street Fighter.
- Iwate Mountain Dance consists entirely of boss battles. Even it's promotional website calls it as such, a "tough-as-nails Bullet Hell boss fighter".
- As befitting the source material, the video game based on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind features dozens of bosses and no mooks of any kind. Save one chapter involving avoiding the boss, and another that's just a cutscene, the game is simply multi-stage bosses, with some even spanning two or three chapters.
- In Jotun, levels are relatively short and won't even necessarily have enemies (just stage hazards.) The huge, multi-stage fights with the titular Jotun are obviously the focal point of the game.
- KaGeKi. Arcade was bosses-only; Genesis port had a few token mooks (all palette swaps of the first boss). Interestingly, the arcade cabinet made a half-baked attempt to pass it off as a boxing game with "Three knockdowns = TKO (Technical Knock Out)", this despite the fact that only three of the nine foes in the game require that number of knockdowns.
- Kingdom Death: Monster pits human survivor miniatures against giant boss miniatures. Some monsters are easier than others, but none are ever a sure kill.
- King of the Monsters 2 (The Neo Geo original; the SNES version has longer levels and the Sega Genesis port is more of a straight one-on-one fighter.)
- Kirby:
- Kirby's Pinball Land can be seen as this, as the gameplay consists of nothing but playing each table for the purpose of fighting the corresponding boss.
- Any Boss Endurance mode in a Kirby game qualifies, including but not limited to: "The Arena" in Kirby Super Star, "The Ultimate Choice" in Kirby Star Allies and "Helper to Hero" and "The True Arena" in the Updated Re-release Kirby Super Star Ultra. In the third of the four, you play not as Kirby, but as a helper-fied mook.
- Kirby: Planet Robobot features a side mode entitled "Team Kirby Clash", an RPG-styled multiplayer mode where players team up against big enemies with one of four reskinned abilities. Every quest in the mode is a mid-boss/boss from a different Kirby game with beefed-up health. The standalone version, Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, includes many more returning bosses as well as a few new ones. And then Super Kirby Clash takes it even further with a few more bosses, both old and new, including but not limited to its familiar-looking main villain, Parallel Nightmare.
- Knuckle Bash, a somewhat obscure arcade only beat-'em-up. Nearly every enemy appears in only one scene in the entire game. The only distinction the "bosses" (each announced with a "VS." screen) have is that they have more powerful attacks and can take more damage, and the difference isn't tremendous.
- Krazy Ivan. There are randomly-spawning mooks, but most of the game is spent in one-on-one shootouts against unique enemy mechs.
- Left 4 Dead and its sequel constantly pits the Survivors against the Special Infected - boss type enemies with either more durability or deadly incapacitating/disorienting attacks. The Versus Mode takes it even further - the respawn rate of Special Infected is boosted dramatically and all but one is player-controlled (except one which only purpose is to One-Hit Kill the unlucky survivor spooking her)
- Lemegeton has mook sections that generally aren't all that dangerous (although some enemies, like the Wood Men, can be rather obnoxious). Bosses, on the other hand, are just about everywhere—every third or fourth room, on average. The first episode had ten bosses, the second episode eleven. There's two more episodes planned.
- The Modern chapter of Live A Live, one of the game's several self-contained adventures, uses the same turn-based battle system as the other chapters but replaces the typical wandering around the overworld with a Fighting Game-style opponent selection screen.
- In Malicious, the focus is on defeating a giant boss in each area, but all the while you're being attacked by hordes of Mooks that can be farmed for Aura, which can be used to heal yourself or power-up your attacks for a brief period of time. Which you'll need to do, as, particularly in the early game, you simply aren't a match for the bosses without the boost to attack and defense.
- Monster Maulers is a Beat 'em Up structured like a Fighting Game. It has short, scant areas where players battle mooks, but at least two-thirds of the game still revolves around boss or Mini-Boss battles.
- The flash game Mario Remix Boss Edition is all about the boss fights, with multiple different tiers of bosses from many different games. You can also play mini-games to replenish your coins. Completing every fight allows you to do it all again... as Luigi!
- Mechstermination Force is a run and gunner in the style of Contra, except all the levels are giant mechs. Which you have to exterminate. Mechstermination if one would.
- Metamoqester, a High Fantasy-themed action game where your bosses include Golems, giant mechas, and an all-powerful demon foetus as the Final Boss.
- Mega Man: The Power Battle and its sequel Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters masquerade as fighting games, but are actually a selection of Robot Master battles (without the preceding stages) from the first seven entries in the main series strung together. However they, for the most part, fight much differently than their games of origin with many new attacks, such as Gutsman punching a boulder that drops down to rain debris across the arena, and Wood Man rolling onto his side to bounce across the arena.
- The Monster Hunter franchise is an interesting example, as your character is just one of thousands of hunters who gets paid to go out hunting wild creatures; it just so happens that virtually everything in their ecosystem is huge. A typical hunting mission calls for the player to go out hunting a (singular) monster, which are functionally boss fights. While there are more Mook-level monsters in the game, they tend to pose almost no danger to the player, acting more like hazards than enemies. On higher-ranked hunting quests, multiple monsters roam and all of them have to be hunted, and on rare occasions the only objective is to hunt an Elder Dragon (or some other incredibly large monster) in a Boss-Only Level.
- All the No More Heroes games, especially the first sequel, where everything but the boss battles (and the short levels leading to them) became optional.
- Pit-Fighter was a 10-stage fighting tournament where up to three players could compete at once and were always matched up against an equal number of opponents. The players had very short health bars and (except for a brief elimination fight near the end) never recovered any health, but could continue as many times as they wanted. Since the opponents never recovered any health either, this meant that anyone could get through the entire game...provided they were willing to spend...and spend...and spend.
- Power Stone 2. The first, second, and fourth stages are 4-man battle royals which continue until two of the combatants are defeated; the third (Pharaoh Walker) and fifth (Dr. Erode) stages are standard boss fights.
- Profane: A game with very similar mechanics to Furi, and which contains nothing but 10 bosses. Oh, and every battle is timed, and time also represents your character's health, as well as the currency used to pay for upgrades.
- Praey for the Gods is an open world action-adventure game inspired by Shadow of the Colossus that takes place on a desolate frozen island where you have to fight gods that involve climbing on them. You also will have to survive by making fires, finding food, craft weapons, and battle minions for better gear. They also caves to explore to discover the history and backstory of this land.
- Fan works made in the Level Editor for the music Bullet Hell Project Arrhythmia often focus on bosses as a means to introduce characters. An example is the Black Heart series, where every level has a boss-fight and the only breaks come from small sections of levels where their boss is absent.
- Protoganda: Strings, Protoganda II, and Fractal Fighter are all Bullet Hell games with nothing but bosses.
- The Punch-Out!! series act like boss-only vertical scroll shooters with fists instead of bullets.
- The further you get in Rabi-Ribi, the more and more the game turns into an excuse for boss fights and the occasional Platform Hell segment, to the point that all of Chapter 5 is nothing but 4 boss fights in a row, and a lot of postgame areas are just prolonged Boss Rushes.
- Radiant Silvergun. In some cases, there's only a short segment of normal enemies between bosses and after stage 5, there are no normal enemy segments between bosses.
- Ragnarok Odyssey and its enhanced remake, Ragnarok Odyssey ACE: Monster Hunter meets Ragnarok Online.
- Red Earth has all the trappings of a fighting game, but you can only pick as one of 4 characters against a collection of CPU-only characters.
- rRootage. 30 non-random stages * 5 bosses per stage * 4 modes = 600 boss battles.
- Sacrifights has you summoning and killing demon bosses in order to eat their parts and grow stronger, with the end goal being to grow strong enough to kill the Ancient One by the time he comes to take you to Hell. Losing a fight to one of these demons makes you lose a day, and you cannot afford to lose too many days.
- Nice Code Software's Seaport Guarl, featured on Dreamgear's Retroplay 200-in-1 plug 'n play system, consists entirely of repeatedly taking on an increasingly fast battleship with a sluggish tank, blatantly ripping off the battleship boss from Iron Tank for the NES.
- Sentinels of the Multiverse is always a battle between a team of heroes and a powerful villain. With few exceptions, the heroes' sole win condition is to incapacitate that one being. Many of the bosses have a substantial number of minions that they can deploy: Baron Blade, The Organization, Grand Warlord Voss, and the Matriarch are the biggest offenders. The two primary exceptions are The Dreamer and the Tormented Ally variation of Infinitor. Both of these are rescue missions, where your goal is to destroy enough of the manifestations while preventing the Dreamer or Infinitor from dying until you save them.
- Shadow of the Colossus — interesting because they are all Puzzle Bosses, and, appropriately, Colossus Climbs. The game is also a grim Deconstruction of this trope (and boss battles in general); the Player Character is basically a poacher hunting down and butchering majestic creatures that are minding their own business in order to fulfill his side of a Deal with the Devil, and each one you kill/harvest makes you more sickly and monstrous, in a total inversion of typical video game progression. And you get a taste of your own medicine at the end, as you are ultimately corrupted entirely and possessed by the aforementioned devil figure, transforming you into a giant boss monster desperately fighting for its life against a small but relentless foe.
- Sin and Punishment and its sequel feature many boss encounters, and even the few reccuring (mini-)bosses like the Mole Seemer have different patterns.
- Skullman In: Scooby Doc 4: The Destroyer (Featuring Atsushi Onita) has a few full levels and the rest is just bosses.
- Sky Serpents has a series of bosses across fifteen levels. Beyond a brief intro section, you spend the game fighting them.
- Spawn: In the Demon's Hand has Boss Attack as its main mode, where you fight a boss in each stage, though most of them are accompanied by mooks, and you'll often have to take out a few to get the boss to appear.
- Spiritual Assassin Taromaru can be completed in around an hour, and contains at least 15 bosses (excluding several Mini-Boss battles). The final stage is notably a colorful Boss Bonanza of enemies.
- Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion's main game and Endless Mode consists of running through halls and rooms to get to the end, and the main challenge comes from the Monster Mash of Specimens which will chase you at randomized points; the only non-boss enemy is the Unusually Violent Deer that only shows up in Specimen 8's rooms. This is averted in the Karamari Hospital and Spooky's Dollhouse modes, which are more traditional puzzle-based explorations of haunted locations with monsters interspersed within.
- The game adaptation of Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Episode III. The levels get shorter and shorter, and increasingly focus on you vs. one enemy, to the point of being a Fighting Game with a few short hallways between arenas.
- Street Fighter 2010, despite its name, is a platformer (that also has nothing to do with Street Fighter) with very short stages. The meat of the game is the boss fights, and Capcom knew it. Many bosses don't even have a stage preceding them, and you're immediately thrust into the fight.
- Street Smart, other than being bosses-only, was a Beat 'em Up in every way that mattered. It was a multi-city fighting tournament starring generic street brawlers Karate Man (1P) and Crusher (2P). Each had three punches and a throw dished out by the same punch button, three kicks delivered by the same kick button, and a (largely useless) jump, all of which looked somewhat different but functioned exactly the same. Both the heroes and opponents could walk in 8 directions, with the opponents having a considerable speed advantage. Each credit bought a certain number of lives; losing all energy (which usually didn't take very long, especially in the later rounds) would cost one life. Each city had a preset first and second opponent, the second starting if both heroes started the match and running in if the second hero jumped in during the match. The opponents had no energy meters but would flash red when they were nearly beaten. They took a massive pounding before giving out but unlike the heroes had no extra lives. Most notably, it was not actually possible for the heroes to be defeated. Losing all lives simply brought up the continue countdown, and if the player continued, all damage to the opponent remained. Only running out of tokens or will could end the quest for the championship.
- Stretch Panic has Linda's twelve demon-possessed sisters as the main obstacles. While there are four standard levels, they have no collectibles and the enemies in them are fairly harmless; they exist purely to grind points, which are used to unlock boss doors and to perform a special move that deals heavy damage to bosses and exorcises the aforementioned demons.
- Strider 2: There's actually a wide variety of fodder enemies, but the levels are very short and often end with a mid-boss battle.
- Sword Master borders on being this; while the odd-numbered stages generally consist of going through a few fodder enemies before fighting mini-bosses and bosses (including demoted ones), the even-numbered ones have Nintendo Hard platforming challenges instead.
- Titan Souls has no regular enemies and every boss is a Puzzle Boss. However, both you and your opponents, the enormous Titans, are technically One Hit Point Wonders, and the key to victory is finding an opening in which you can Attack Its Weak Point.
- Touhou Project:
- The Windows games are loose examples. The stages aren't exactly short due to the fixed scrolling rate, but depending on the difficulty, boss fights can take five to six times as long as the stage (or more than ten times if the bosses have attacks that render them invincible for a duration). The PC-98 games had better developed stages and don't fit this trope as well. Special mention goes to the 9th game, Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View, which is 100% boss fight, with random Mooks flying around in order to allow you to build up your Spell Cards and attack your opponent.
- Touhou Bunkachou ~ Shoot the Bullet. Since the objective is to take photos of the various residents of Gensokyo, each stage consists solely of Aya vs Boss. Also true of its sequel, Double Spoiler, and fellow spinoff game Impossible Spellcard.
- Urban Reign. There are a few characters that qualify as flunkies, but for the most part, you're up against various combinations of big bosses, lieutenants, Elite Mooks, Quirky Miniboss Squads, and the occasional Worf. Many of the stages allow you to have a partner.
- Wade Hixton's Counter Punch being a Punch Out clone for the GBA, pits you against a series of quirky bosses.
- Yie Ar Kung-Fu. The hero (Oolong) was a little bitty sprite who used a bunch of chopsocky moves against a series of increasingly tougher opponents, also little bitty sprites. The reason the game required so much empty space above the combatants was that Oolong could jump about 40 feet high, and in fact lots (and lots and lots and lots) of jumping was key to beating most of the opponents.
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monster Coliseum, Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories, Yu-Gi-Oh!: Dungeon Dice Monsters, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, the whole game is Yugi or the Player Avatar facing off against his friends, rivals, and enemies. There are segments where you can buy monsters and save, but the majority of your time will be spent in battle.
Entirely Bosses
- Abadox is a shmup where you fight against the titular planet-sized entity, with all bosses and even the stages themselves being part of it.
- Bound by Blades is an Action-RPG where you're an andromorphic cat warrior fighting assorted boss enemies. The promotional website even cites "Unending Boss Rush" as a selling point!
- Destroy the Godmodder is an extremely lengthy one of these, probably helped because the Godmodder tends to summon minions to help him out. In addition, many significant plot moments in a game occur when a major boss other than the Godmodder appears on the Battlefield, temporarily moving the spotlight away from the latter and towards the former.
- The iOS/Android game Endless Boss Fight. No points for guessing what the whole game is.
- Grinning Cobossus is nothing but a fight against the titular Cobossus.
- Listen To The Wind can be completed in around an hour, where every stage is a boss battle with you collecting upgrades in-between.
- The Mega Man fan game Mega Man Boss Exchange is a collection of Mega Man bosses created as art trades, using the Megamix Engine. As such, there are options for the player to fight as many bosses as they wish, and the only screens preceding these boss fights are a single room containing power-ups, and the signature double doors.
- A game on Neopets is appropriately called "The Neverending Boss Battle".
- The obscure arcade game Omega Fighter consists entirely of a battle against a giant enemy warship, with each stage corresponding to a different part of the ship.
- In the Western RPG Perihelion, unusually for normal gameplay in an RPG, every enemy encountered in the game is a boss, with no regular enemies to be found. This also means the only way to level up is to kill a boss.
- SINNER Sacrifice For Redemption is an action-RPG where you fight against 7 monstrous bosses, all of them modeled after the Seven Deadly Sins.
- The old Vector Game Star Castle, though from an era when it was not common for video games to have levels to explore or varied stage design, has the one big enemy to destroy always present.
- Trillion: God of Destruction. The titular antagonist is the only meaningful foe in the game, and can be challenged at any time. The entire rest of the game is an elaborate Training Montage to get your overlords powerful enough to have a fighting chance.
- Ultimate Crab Battle is just a fight against the titular crab.
- The indie Xbox 360 game You Will Die
- The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is a boss rush bullet hell shoot'em up where you play as one of five alien girls who has to escape a cave that filled with monsters. To deal with these monsters, they have to be defeated with love. It also has roguelike elements with several encounters different along with power-ups called "Gifts".
- Warning Forever pits the player's fighter ship against a sequence of ever-upgrading enemies.
- Yars' Revenge was originally going to be a port of Star Castle and has the same basic set-up. The only thing to do in the game is to defeat the Qotile by blasting apart its core and then hitting it with the Zorlon Cannon.
- You Have to Burn the Rope entirely consists of a corridor with a Puzzle Boss at the end.
- Zettai Hero Project advertises itself as such. The intro says that the whole game is nothing but one long epic battle... which is sort of correct. The Big Bad, Darkdeath Evilman, is continuously trying to kill you and Super Baby, he just punts you into orbit away from the action every level, and you have to fight through a random dungeon just to get back to him (and get your ass thrown into outer space again). So this is invoked meta-wise if not gameplay-wise.
Boss Remix
- Darius Alpha, a rare variant of Darius Plus in which you fight all of the bosses of Darius Plus one after the other.
- DoDonpachi Daioujou: Death Label. At the end, you fight two Hibachis at once.
- Reallyjoel's Dad mode in Hero Core is a parody of this that's supposed to be impossible to beat. It consists of a single room that contains almost every single boss in the game.
- Ketsui: Death Label on the Nintendo DS (with the "Extra Course" being the sole exception by virtue of being a full-length stage with a special version the game's True Final Boss at the end of it).
- A cheat code for Kirby's Pinball Land will turn it into this, eliminating the main pinball stages and instead sending you straight to the boss battles.
- Left 4 Dead 2 has "Last Man on Earth" mutation which has only one survivor against only the Special Infected that is summoned periodically, one at a time.
- The Mega Man 2 fan game Rockman 2 Neta, which allows you to fight the eight Robot Masters of said game all at once.
- The Mega Man 5 ROM hack Rockman Cross X (not to be confused with Rockman X Over), which features entirely redone Robot Masters (two from each of the the first four games) and aside from one or two rooms before a boss, the hack is nothing but boss battles.
- The Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ROM hack Robotnik's Revenge is a boss rush of all 17 bosses from the first two Sonic the Hedgehog games.
- There are two different passwords in Xexyz that allow you to play against only the bosses (one for the odd-numbered ground stages, and another for the even-numbered flying stages).
- Team Fortress 2 has the Vs. Saxton Hale/Freak Fortress 2 Game Mod, which removes the normal team-vs-team gameplay and instead has a random player, who is selected to be a powerful boss character, fight against everyone else in the server.
- Hollow Knight added the Godhome area with the Godmaster update; this is a dream area where you can fight the game's bosses again (with every boss you've fought in the save file available to fight), and engage in several Boss Rush sequences, known as Pantheons. Clearing several Pantheons will unlock the ability to start a new save file in God Tuner mode. A God Tuner save file starts a player with every possible health, soul, charm, and nail upgrade, and almost every Charm acquired (except for certain mutually-exclusive ones). It also places the player in a fully-unlocked Godhome right away, and doesn't allow the player to leave Godhome. A God Tuner save, then, is a Boss Game, instead of an exploration game. This can be useful if a player hasn't unlocked everything in their main save file.
- The (very rare) Comiket 74 release of the "Boss Rush-only" edition of Ether Vapor that strips the game down to nothing but its boss battles.
