NOTE: Final Boss and Wake-Up Call Boss cannot be That One Boss without being overly hard by their standards. Please do not add them as examples.
- The Command & Conquer games have missions in each game that serve as That One Boss.
- Two GDI Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars missions are surprisingly difficult. The Alexandria mission is a fairly standard mission that just happens to be extremely difficult (even though it was featured in the demo), but the Croatia mission (just 2 missions later) is made of Nightmare Fuel. The first phase of the mission has you defending a crippled GDI base that has no construction yard, entrance points on the North, South, East, and West sides, and only enough power to have the defenses turned on for two sides at a time. Meanwhile, you guessed it: Nod sends waves of attackers from all four directions. You have to defend this base for 10 minutes. Then a convoy arrives, including a construction vehicle, across the river, but Nod forces have turrets and several garrisoned buildings over there. And they send suicide bombers at the construction vehicle. You need to (slowly) drive past and/or destroy the Nod forces while protecting the construction vehicle, while STILL defending your base, which isn't any easier than it was before and still requires plenty of micromanagement. Once you do manage to get your construction vehicle across the bridge and into your base, you can finally start building stuff again, but it's still a good 10 minutes before you're able to have anything resembling a stable base and build up enough troops to finally start killing the Nod bases that are sending troops at you.
- Possibly THE hardest mission in the game is the last Nod mission or Hard level. The goal is to protect the alien tower Threshold 19 from GDI attack. The problem? GDI shows the player just what exactly tank rush means with Predators advancing in the dozens with half as much Mammoths as support. Although they aren't attacking the player, the tower is protected by a Scrin base who are on the receiving end of a Curbstomp Battle: if GDI destroys the phase generators they're guarding, it's mission failed. These very phase generators also happen to be under attack from a band of Juggernauts as soon as the mission starts. Building up a decent-sized vehicle force to fend off the attack on the generators is impossible in the meager time available, and Zerg Rush of Venoms also impossible to pull off since the dozens of APCs, Pitbulls and Mammoths just swat them out of the sky like flies and building more is not an option even if four harvesters are working on funds, there's just not enough money and time. To top it all off, GDI units are trained/built as elite and instantly become heroic upon scoring a single kill.
On Medium, it is possible to drive a wedge between the two armies via an Outpost surrounded by Obelisks to give the aliens enough breathing room to build up and eventually counterattack (they even build a Rift Generator and deploy it against GDI repeatedly if you let them, Kane bless 'em); nuking the lower GDI base also lifts the siege of the player's base and removes all GDI infantry from the fight. On Hard, by the time the nuke is ready to launch, GDI has already blown away two phase generators, with a mass of tanks advancing on the defenseless third. Oh, and just to get to the main battlefield, you have to make a big detour since your base is facing the opposite side of the Scrin base. As a little good news, the Scrin won't attack you if you stay out of the way so you can focus on finishing the mission by blowing GDI off the map.- The penultimate mission for Nod isn't that much better. It basically involves you having to take down a GDI base and a Scrin base with only a handful of engineers and other basic infantry. The goal of this mission is to wait until the main forces of the GDI and Scrin are fighting each other (which they do every 5 minutes or so) sneak to one of their bases, take over some buildings, and build you army to combat them. The unfortunate part is that the enemy is quick to wise up to this and will try to flank your forces and buildings you stole and blow them away. The mission can easily become unwinnable if you don't capture the right balance of buildings and base defenses.
- Scrin mission 3 in Kane's Wrath is also pretty hard unless you manage to salvage some Juggernauts to remove the Sonic Emitters protecting the GDI base.
- The last China mission in Command & Conquer: Generals. You have very very few resources to build up with, the GLA constantly attacks (and due to weird terrain, your units are happy to sit there and get shot), and worst of all they start off with their superweapon, which they WILL use. Repeatedly. On parts of your base they shouldn't even know exist. The GLA army also has a Scud Storm that is scripted to fire if your funds go above 5000 (and China doesn't have the ability to remove Fog of War, meaning any attempt to destroy it via artillery barrage requires lots of blind-firing). That means you can't capture the oil derricks.
- China 3 in Generals: Zero Hour is more then likely the single most difficult mission played on hard in all of the Generals games, on both variants of it. It requires either crazy luck to beat on the older updated, and is near-impossible even with dedicated save-scumming on the new Origin version. A clock hemorrhages time and you lose when it runs out unless you can destroy one of six scattered and defended map objectives to give you a few more precious minutes. Part of the battle is minimizing units lost because you just don't have the time to wait and make replacements, and you need everything you can muster to make the final push into an enemy base for the last objective. The map is caked with invisible explosive barrels capable of wiping out several or more units per blast; you want to be safe to find and neutralize them, but you need to hurry. The enemy makes extensive use of roaming artillery in the form of Scud launchers, and is smart enough to run away when you send troops to attack them: the Scud launchers are faster than most of your units, and if a chase of more then 10 seconds occurs, it will likely run you into another artillery patrol. Besides that, the center of the map has obscured LOS for tanks in the form of houses, but not for said Scuds, and 1 missile is enough to obliterate an irreplaceable chunk of your armor unless you quickly micro your units to disperse. If a Scud ranks up to elite/heroic (which is possible in 1 good shot), you need to restart the mission. You're constantly harassed by fast, long range Rocket Buggies that hit and run your units and outskirt buildings, and the enemy general power of spawning some 20 soldiers in your base's undefended parts. Further, destroying an objective makes the enemy send a counter-attack of artillery and meat-shield units, which can easily mop your force if you aren't attentive. Besides that, invisible anti-tank/air Stinger sites dot the map, which you need to destroy in order to send in a carpet bomber to neutralize half of the objectives, else fail the mission due to time running out. It would be fairly doable if you had access to China's Helix helicopter, or MiGs, or even your own Inferno Cannons (the weaker of your 2 artillery) to provide some support against the enemy artillery, but they aren't available this time. Further, you don't have the general power of artillery barrage for precise, unstoppable objective destruction, meaning you need to use semi-reliable and stoppable carpet bombers. Worst yet, the Origin version removes carpet bombers, meaning you have to somehow find a way past mostly undocumented (due to no guides of it existing) Stinger sites, explosive barrels, SCUDS, and Buggies for 3/6 of the objectives, while trying to retain a similar amount of units that you would have if you otherwise could us carpet bombers. In short, you really are one of the best Generals players if you can beat it.
- The Eldar Falcon Tank from Dawn of War 2. It has powerful and annoyingly precise guns that can kill your men in mere seconds from large distance and if you try to revive them, it will just kill them again without even moving! You have to lure the tank away with good chances that the bait will end up dead as well. The only one who can get near enough to use the anti-tank Melta bombs is the scout Cyrus, but if he's yet to learn an ability to throw the bombs without breaking stealth (and it's quite a high-level ability), he will be shot immediately after the throw (it takes more then one bomb, naturally) and then... see above. If he does get said ability though, the boss becomes a cakewalk... as well as almost every other one after him.
- The fight against Martellus if your whole team remain pure. He has a custom Chaos Predator that is essentially a Space Marine Predator on steroids. The tank will wreck your party in seconds, even if they have Terminator Armor. Worst part is, it's not even canon. Avitus is the traitor.
- Evil Genius eventually has Super Agents attack you as you start doing well in the game. These guys are effectively combinations of two agent types rolled into one. The first one, Mariana Mamba (who totally doesn't look like Honey Ryder), who functions like a Saboteur and a Thief, is a greater annoyance than the majority of agents, but is still manageable. But the very second one, Jet Chan, is where things get really nasty. This guy functions like a Thief and a Soldier, the latter of which is one of the most Trigger-Happy enemies in the game. In a game where your minions will often choose to get into melee battles, as you may expect from a Bruce Lee Clone, Jet Chan has the most melee strength out of anyone in the game, often killing in just one or two strikes, gleefully massacring any minion in his way and blasting whatever he sees to kingdom come, personal defense capacity be damned. What doesn't help is that even if you gang up on him, thanks to his ability, most attacks are very likely to miss. If you aren't careful, Jet Chan will rip your base to pieces and leave your Evil Genius very very dead.
- For a combination of Dungeon Keeper and James Bond, who better to be one of the most difficult bosses than Bond himself? (Or as close as one can get to him without violating copyrights, anyway.) John Steele is the last of the Super Agents that you'll encounter and you'll very quickly see why. This guy functions as a combination of an Investigator and Saboteur, meaning that not only will he happily tear your base apart, but he'll also photograph any incriminating evidence around your base and bring it back to HQ, giving S.A.B.R.E incentive to send stronger agents after you. His special ability, Base Mayhem, very much causes Exactly What It Says on the Tin, not only resetting security levels on your doors, meaning that anyone can get through, not just your minions, but causing explosions all over the place, trashing your stuff and wrecking your minions. He's not too shabby on the field, either. That's not even the worst part, though. All Super Agents have an optional objective corresponding to them which allows you to eliminate them, since you can't kill them, but you can subject them to a Fate Worse than Death, getting them out of your hair for good. John Steele, though? He doesn't have one. Yes, you've got to put up with this sucker to the very end. Unless, that is you have him in a cell (not easy in and of itself, since Super Agents will break out if you leave them alone for so much as a few seconds) at the moment you press the button to win the game right at the end, where he'll be shot into space along with the rocket holding your Kill Sat. Enjoy!
- Homeworld 2, mission 12, especially if you have a full fleet. The enemy sends you massive, massive fleet against your position, with something like at least 7 battlecruisers, and lots of other ships combined. Cheating is not an option either; increasing your fleet size also increases that of the enemy.
- Iron Marines:
- In terms of Mini-Boss standards, Peripheroid Overseers are quite a pain. Like the Fell Bishops, they're fast, durable, and powerful with a deadly ranged attack. Unlike Fell Bishops, these actually retreat and take to the air when you do enough damage to them. When airborne they use a Macross Missile Massacre that deals tremendous damage from a long distance and can hit spread-out groups of troops, and only after a while will they return to attempt melee combat on the ground. All this makes the tactic used against Fell Bishops fall flatnote and requires the use of Shellstorms to do good damage to them and a Brawler to tank. Thankfully, they're only found in two Brutal Bonus Levels after you beat the main campaign, but they certainly are deadly when encountered each time.
- Nexus, the boss of the third planet Borealis. He is a lot more difficult than the Fell Tyrant or Mr. Rob070 thanks to being three Escort Missions with a Poor Pace Escortee. Firstly, Nexus retreats into a portal and regenerates a short while after he's killed. Each phase, you have a very slow-moving but durable turtle mech unit that must enter that portal to destroy it before Nexus regenerates. If any of the turtle mechs die in any phase, you fail the mission. Nexus will fire a Knock Back energy blast at the nearest unit to him which also stops their movement, and most of his elemental attacks if not interrupted via targeting his hand and attacking it enough will target the Tortugon and some can outright One-Hit Kill it such as the rain of meteors. Each time you get a Tortugon into the portal, Nexus will begin to use far more dangerous attacks. The worst is the final phase, where he'll be accompanied by Quantum Carriers (flying Demonic Spiders that drop Goddamned Bats upon death and fire giant, slow-moving purple balls that do painful constant contact damage that explode after a bit of time dealing even more damage), he can unavoidably Life Drain all your units on the field putting you on a timer since the Tortugon is also affected, and he gains That One Attack where he summons destructible devices with decent health around your Tortugon that must be targeted one by one. If any of them are not destroyed in time, they will detonate into said purple balls aimed right at your Tortugon. On Normal, he summons four. On Impossible mode, he summons six. Basically, prepare to move around all your units a lot, use the unreliable targeting to prevent the dangerous moves, and even then if he manages to pull off the meteor attack where it hits an area your Tortugon can't avoid, you're still out of luck. The only silver linings are that you get a new Tortugon with full HP each phase and that there's toolkits that periodically drop which will heal the Tortugon.
- The final two missions of ParaWorld pit you against the full might of the evil SEAS society. You have dinosaurs, spears, swords, axes, bows, and catapults. They have cyborg dinosaurs, robots, flamethrowers, and guns. Oh, and there's also the towers that do 100 damage a hit, which is roughly every second. However, the example that most perfectly illustrates how overpowered they are is a robot that is a high-level special unit for you-but a LOW-LEVEL unit for the SEAS.
- The key is faction selection. The 2nd last level has the SEAS pulling out everything so they will outgun the Dragon Clan and they're too heavily armoured for the Dust Riders. So use the Norseman and bulk up on Triceratops and have Crossbowmen garrison in them. The Crossbowmen will gun down SEAS units and anything strong enough to withstand the barrage will get slaughtered by the Triceratops. For the last level, go Dragon Clan and use Ninjas and a monk. There's no base building for anyone so no one is expendable but the same goes for the SEAS. The Ninjas are great here, they will kill anything in melee even if its heavily armoured while capable of soaking a lot of damage. Any other unit lacks the durability and anti-armor ability. Hurt party members and ninjas can be healed by the monk. Both levels are actually very easy if you use the appropriate faction. Otherwise, good luck...
- Every of the final missions can be completed using just a favorite tribe. Dragon Clan fleet outright murders the SEAS one and you get the observatories warning of any attack, so you win even before landing on the enemy beaches. Also, Dustrider beasts absolutely trashcan SEAS robots, no armor-piercing attacks needed; and since they have plasma towers, mobile economy and field tornado-casting-necromancers, they are actually the easiest choice for the penultimate mission. In the final one the army composition should just meathshield for the heroes till they reprogramm the towers; afterwards no support is needed at all. A single healer is mandatory, the rest irrelevant.
- Pikmin': Many, many, many'' of the bosses, especially if you're trying to keep all your Pikmin alive. Here are the worst offenders:
- Pikmin (2001):
- The Puffstool. If you don't what you're doing and attack it head on, it'll spray spores everywhere and turn your Pikmin into hostile fungal abominations. Cue Curb-Stomp Battle from your previous allies and only ways to defend yourself.
- Emperor Bulblax. Giant, capable of eating many Pikmin with one swipe of his tongue, and with his only weak point being his face, which he can reach with his tongue, the Emperor is just brutal. He has tons of health that must all be taken in one day or else he'll get it back. The easiest way to damage him is to throw Bomb-Rocks in his mouth, which will probably result in your rock throwers being eaten. To top it all off, he starts jumping around the arena when his health is low. Anything caught in that will be dead in a second. And he holds the last part you need to get the good ending.
- Pikmin 2:
- The Segmented Crawster, a Bullfight Boss that is capable of killing almost all your Pikmin very, very quickly. If you can manage to avoid its rolling attack, the rocks will probably do you in. The best strategy for this boss seems to be: "Bring all your red and purple Pikmin, use a Spicy Spray, and pray to God you kill it in one go."
- The second and third encounters with the Empress Bulblax — if her "squish 'em all" attack from the first fight wasn't bad enough, now she endlessly spawns a stream of tiny enemies out of her ass that, while extremely fragile, can devour Pikmin instantaneously.
- The Titan Dweevil. Not only is its acid attack extremely hard to avoid, and not only is its electric attack a one-hit kill on your Pikmin, parts of it drop off during the fight. Distracted Pikmin who don't know any better will try to cart them off during the fight, leaving them vulnerable. Oh, so you brought a mix of Pikmin to counter the various attacks, and figured out you can leave some of them outside the arena to protect them from harm? Oh, you poor, ignorant bastard. Once the Dweevil pulls out the water cannon, nowhere is safe.
- One of the toughest bosses in the second game would probably be Man-at-Legs. It's similar to its relative, Beady Long Legs, the good news is, it can't squash your Pikmin by stomping on them. The bad news is... it has a build-in, laser-guided machine gun. Losing quite a few Pikmin is pretty much guaranteed. Insultingly, the treasure the first one drops isn't even anything useful. It's just A lightbulb that makes caves somewhat brighter. However, this first fight is nothing compared to the floor in one of the last caves where you have to fight it in the middle of a pool of water with very limited cover for you and your Pikmin to take.
- Pikmin 3: The Quaggled Mireclops is not a pushover either. For starters, Rock Pikmin are absolutely required for the first phase of the fight, due to the fact that the creature's weakspot just happens to be covered in a crystal node. Secondly, the Mireclops uses its feet to squash anything that isn't a Rock Pikmin. The Rock Pikmin would've delivered a Curb-Stomp Battle to this creature if it weren't for the fact that its massive stomping feet create temporary pools of water, meaning that anything that isn't a Blue Pikmin will drown. Once the Mireclops' feet are damaged enough to topple it over and expose its weakspot, it spins its tongue around its body to eat a large chunk of your army, and it does this twice once it's low on health. To top this all off, the Mireclops can drag its whole body across the arena once it Turns Red, which can cause a Total Party Kill.
- Pikmin (2001):
- StarCraft: In the Expansion Pack, a lot of people find the eigth Terran Mission to be rather difficult, especially with the Torrasque respawning only two minutes after it dies, making it a potentially base-destroying unit the first time it is deployed then a major nuisance after that. But the eighth Zerg mission in the expansion is an absolute brick wall. Both levels require swift action and good co-ordination by the player against enemies with the entire tech tree at their disposal and superhuman skill with some units' special abilities. If you don't know the correct path to take, Terran mission 8 is nigh impossible. Zerg 8, with its crazy combined arms shenanigans, is far and away more difficult. (Zerg 10, "Omega", is arguably easier if you're good at defense, since at least you only have to kill one base at a time.)
- StarCraft II has Maar, one of the few legitimate bosses in the game. Normally, you need to complete the mission objective to kill him for good, otherwise he revives after a while and slowly grows in strenght each time. The Immortals make short work of him though. On Brutal, he revives in seconds, and the main base is protected by a lot of air units while you only have Stalkers to deal with these.
- The Total War series had a few factions that could count. Medieval 1 had late game Turks/Ottomans. Left unchecked they will take over half the world map, they will have roughly 70 full stacks of troops, and will accept nothing less than your complete and utter destruction.
- Medieval II: Total War has the Mongols. They can show up at one of three different spots on the map, at a random time, with more stacks than spread out your entire kingdom. All of them heading towards your capital. If you're not prepared for them by that point with some decent anti-cavalry, you may as well delete that save. Oh, and they were just a warm up. Their bastard children the Timurids come along after you've taken an appropriate ass-kicking from the Mongols, or alternatively whenever the game feels like it. They're basically the same, EXCEPT FOR ALL THE ELEPHANTS WITH CANNONS ON THEM, ALL POINTED AT YOU. Yup, just like in real life, the Mongols are utter combat monsters.
- Many people have declared Total War: Attila to be the hardest game in the series yet. The main reason for this being that The Huns are an absolute nightmare. The Huns are unable to capture cities, so they usually just torch them, leaving you without sources of troops and income. They have the best Calvary units in the game, meaning you can outnumber them in a battle and they will STILL wipe the floor with you. They also do not have any unit upkeep, so they can have an insane of amount of army stacks with all their best units at zero charge. Want to take them out before they get to powerful? To bad, it is physically impossible to defeat the Huns while Attila is still alive (including before he even becomes their leader). If you defeat the Huns' last army and Attila is still alive, a new army will spawn and continue to wreck everything. Finally, as the icing on the cake, Attila doesn't die after you defeat him in battle. You have to defeat and kill Attila several times before he stays dead, and you can't kill him through assassination. Once Attila finally kicks the bucket, the Huns pretty much lose all their power and you can resume playing the game with less hair being torn out of your head.
- Selvaria Bles in Valkyria Chronicles definitely holds this trope. The first time you fight her, she can effortlessly slaughter your foot units; the only way to really stop her is to block her from your soldiers with your goddamn tank. The second time? She gets anti-tank capabilities. Did I mention that if the main character's tank is destroyed, it's game over?
- Also from Valkyria Chronicles, the entire fight against the Batomys. Not only is the premise of the battle a bit ridiculous (you have to knock over chunks of wall so the Batomys has to fire its main cannon and explode its radiators), but the turrets mounted on the tank are tiny, and your Lancers are so inaccurate they couldn't hit water if they were standing on a boat. If the Batomys gets even one shot off at the Edelweiss, it's instant game over, so you're constantly maneuvering to stay out of its firing range while also knocking down walls (which has to be done with mortars rather than shells even though the game states you can use both, and the mortars have to hit a precise unmarked spot on the wall). If you do manage to get the Batomys to expose its radiators twice, and your Scouts manage to climb it and chuck a grenade in there, you get a short cut scene and suddenly WHOOPS, here comes an entire squad (including Lancers), blindsiding you and appearing out of nowhere, instantly getting the initiative. Since your tank is almost always positioned right where the squad spawns (because you're backing away out of the Batomys' firing line), the enemy units only need a single turn to reach it, and get around it if necessary, which means one Lancer will circle your tank and blast it right in the radiator for another instant game over. If you've somehow prepared for this occurrence (by, oh say, getting a few game overs and getting in position for a squad which you shouldn't know is coming), you still have an invulnerable Valkyria, the afore-mentioned Selvaria, rampaging across the battle field, who has an instant kill attack with tremendous range and an interception radius that is close to 360°. It's an enormously cheap battle which you can only win by trial-and-error gameplay.
- You would think the mission where she faces you as a regular human instead of a Valkyria would be easier, right? Guess again. She gets a machine gun with a range that can hit anywhere on the battlefield she has a line of sight to, and has an accuracy rivaling sniper rifles. Not to mention that she dodges every attack that isn't from behind, is sitting beyond FIVE BASES worth of defenses (and continuous reinforcements) and will make plentiful use of the Heal All order. Oh, and things like mortars and grenades, which are the usual way to deal with Aces and such that dodge attacks? She's TOTALLY IMMUNE TO THEM.
- While technically not a boss, Ty the Immortal has an honorable mention. He must be blessed with ESP, as he will dodge every goddamn attack you throw at him, even if you're sniping at him from across the map. Ty also has the dubious honor of appearing in multiple missions, even if you killed him in a previous chapter. This particular Ace deserves mention because of the second mission in which he appears, because he is directly on the path you need to take, can easily kill either one of the two units you have (and you need to keep both of them alive and get them to the destination together), and has a lot more HP than the other enemy units. To make matters worse, one of your units' movement is impaired.
- EVERY Enemy Ace does that. None of them are bosses, or even required to kill, but you get amazing weapons if you do defeat them.
