That One Boss / The Legend of Zelda

• The Legend of Zelda has Gleeok, a hydra monster found in three dungeons. He has multiple heads that can shoot fireballs from multiple angles, and when each head takes enough damage, it starts flying around the room to become an Invincible Minor Minion, which can continue to spit fire from even more angles while also causing Collision Damage. The other bosses are pushovers, but all you can do against Gleeok is stand your ground and hope you have a potion left.
• The last two bosses in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, both fought in the already difficult Great Palace:
  • The Thunderbird. First, you have to use the Thunder spell to make him vulnerable at all (and one use of it will nearly empty your magic meter; at best you'll deplete half of it if it's fully upgraded and extended). Then, you have to hit the small, exposed face of a giant bird-thing that will be spitting fireballs at you machine-gun style. Good luck, you'll need it!
  • Dark Link. He will block nearly every single one of your attacks, and manage to punish every single mistake you make. Not only that, he likes to jump on you and do Collision Damage even though you can't do the same to him. It also does not help that he's directly after the above-mentioned Thunderbird. Finally, lose all your lives, and it's back to the beginning of the Great Palace. The fight can be rendered a non-issue by exploiting his AI, but this trick doesn't work in the Japanese version, and good luck figuring that out as a kid in the 80s.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past:
  • Helmasaur King, the first boss of the Dark World. He takes 25 (or if you use bombs during his first phase, which is more effective but much, much more difficult and slow, 13) hits to defeat. Meanwhile, even if you get as many heart pieces as you can in that point in the game, he can kill you in just 5 hits. If you don't take the time to get the maximum amount of Heart Containers, he can kill you in just three to four hits... assuming you don't take any damage on the path to him, which is filled with tough enemies.
  • Mothula holds the title in this game. Erratic movement, randomly-changing conveyor floor, randomly moving blade traps, and a three-beam attack that's hard to avoid if you're trying hard to avoid all the other perils. Worse still, a bug in the original SNES versions made him invulnerable to certain attacks of the level 3 sword and almost all attacks of the level 4 sword (The weak poke is all that works). Using the dungeon's item, the Fire Rod, works well so long as one doesn't run of of magic power.
  • Kholdstare, the boss of the Ice Palace. Although his second stage isn't particularly difficult, his first stage can only be hurt by the Fire Rod (a magic item), and if you haven't upgraded your magic meter it takes all of your magic to melt the ice. The Bombos Medallion – an optional item that usually doesn't work on bosses – will end the first phase in a single shot, but still requires 25% of a standard magic meter. He doesn't drop any magic jars, so if you don't have the right item(s) and enough magic, you'll have to Magic Mirror out, refill your magic, fight your way through the whole dungeon again, and then try the fight again. Also, the Ice Palace itself relies on the Fire Rod very heavily, so the magic upgrade is basically a must-get before entering.
  • Trinexx. You have to use magic attacks to defeat him, which is made a little more merciful by the fact that magic potions are generated in the battle, but still very hard. The worst part, however, is the freaking middle head that bobs out at you fairly often. This will be your downfall in the fight. He gives warning as to when he's going to do it, but even so, it's very difficult to dodge. And if you forgot to pick up the Ice Rod, (the location of which which is hinted at by Sahasrahla, but it's found outside of a dungeon and it's in an out-of-the-way area so if you don't pay attention to his hint, you'll miss it, and until this point in the game it's completely optional), you can't beat his first form, making him unkillable. To add insult to injury, the Ice Rod's projectile moves very slowly, meaning Trinexx will dodge your shot if given half the chance.
• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening:
  • The Armos Knight isn't that bad in the original version of the game, falling pretty quickly once you break his shield and even quicker if you have the Red Mail. The Video Game Remake places him square in the middle of this trope, though, for one big reason—his body is now completely invulnerable to your sword. You have to jump up with the Roc's Feather and hit his head with a spin attack to hurt him. If you miss, the boss moves quickly enough that you're all but guaranteed to take Collision Damage. What was a Breather Boss in the original can now cause multiple game overs even for people intimately familiar with the Game Boy game. The Bow & Arrows make things a bit easier...if you saved up enough Rupees to buy the VERY expensive Bow from the town shop.
  • Blaino, the mid-boss of the Turtle Rock, for a single charged punch from him will punch you back to the dungeon entrance. He's also almost impossible to hit except when he's preparing that charged punch (which only takes a couple of seconds to charge); if you don't stand in quite the right place while attacking him, he'll hit you and start the battle over. And he has a quicker punch that stuns you, allowing him to land his dungeon-exit punch on you all the more easily. And this guy is the miniboss.
  • Genie needs a lot of punishment to be taken down and pelts Link with fireballs which take away a full heart each; given that Link is likely to only have four hearts at this point, there's little margin for error. The DX version reduced his attack speed to make him easier.
  • The Evil Eagle is similar to the Angler Fish, but his boss fight requires you to use the Mirror Shield to push against the winds he'll create with his wings, and block his razor sharp feathers. If you get hit or stand in the wrong place, you'll more than likely fall down, causing the fight to reset like with Moldorm. The Switch version changes it so falling off the tower doesn't reset the fight, although getting back up to the top with the eagle spraying feathers isn't easy.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
  • Dark Link is particularly frustrating because he's only a miniboss. This is even worse considering that the actual boss of that level (That One Level through and through) can be much easier by comparison. A difficult duel could be fun, if there was some technique to it. But your quick-stab is useless (Dark Link jumps on top of your sword, then hits you), your jump attack is useless (Dark Link jumps to the side, then jump-attacks you), and he seems to dodge the spin attack, which leaves madly mashing the standard attack, which Dark Link seems to do endlessly with the same speed while locked on, so the blows deflect each other. About the only way to beat him in a sword fight is to either use a non-standard weapon, like the Broken Giant's Knife or Biggoron's Sword, or go against every instinct the game has ingrained into you and turn off Z-targeting, which makes it harder for him to read your moves. Furthermore, his HP depends on how many maximum hearts you have, so building up your health just makes the struggle worse. It does unintentionally make the boss much easier on three-heart runs, though.
  • Phantom Ganon on his horse is really tough and brutal if you don't know how his lightning attack works. Basically, if you haven't mastered the aim of your Fairy Bow or if you don't know about the triangles within the room, you can be in a serious world of hurt, and the lightning attack does 2 hearts of damage, which is a pretty huge chunk at your current health if you haven't been collecting any Heart Pieces other than the ones you got after defeating the other 3 bosses. Once you take out his horse, his Final Boss Preview form is easier.
  • Bongo Bongo is invisible, requiring the magic-draining Lens of Truth to be equipped for the duration of the fight, and constantly slams the arena to bounce Link around. While the latter problem can be circumvented by wearing the Hover Boots, said item also comes with the unfortunate side-effect of reducing your traction. To defeat the boss, both its hands must be stunned, which will prompt it to perform a highly-damaging tackle that must be stopped with a precise shot to the creature's eye. To make matters worse, Bongo Bongo has far more health than any other boss in the game.
  • Twinrova can be an extremely frustrating fight unless you know exactly what you're supposed to do. You have to use the Mirror Shield to redirect one witch's elemental attack onto the other in the first phase, and in the second you have to make the Mirror Shield absorb three attacks from the same element and then redirect it onto the merged form of the witches. In case you're not positioned properly to absorb or redirect the next attack, it's best to dodge it altogether and wait for the next attack, because both the fire beam and the ice torrent deal a lot of damage, and spread through a huge part of the floor in case they don't hit you.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask:
  • Considering the Great Bay Temple is That One Level, all of its bosses are just as difficult as the level:
    • Wart, the first mini boss, is a giant moving eyeball surrounded by 40 bubbles that act as a shield. Those spheres take two hits (one hit with the Gilded Sword) to destroy and bounce around after the first hit. The player can choose to ignore the spheres and just wail on the boss, but they will inevitably lose a lot of health as more bubbles start colliding with Link.
    • The second mini boss, the Gekko, requires the player to have good reflexes; otherwise, the player will be captured by the massive falling bubble (which is formed every time the Gekko is hurt), which will be very frequent. Whenever that happens, the Gekko will beat Link down like a punching bag, giving no chance for Link to defend himself.
    • Finally, the boss himself, Gyorg. You have to go into the water and hit Gyorg with your Zora electric shield. Then, while you can still swim back to the platform here, you are unlikely to reach it before Gyorg eats you and spits you out for massive damage. With two fairies there's more room for taking damage, but otherwise it's very hard. The Fierce Deity Mask makes the fight easy — but you have to beat Gyorg at LEAST once without it to even get this mask in the first place. Although the game's remake made Gyorg easier to hit, it also added the second phase where he destroys the arena's only platform, leading to an aggravating Underwater Boss Battle. Stunning it involves severing the chains scattered around the arena, which will release a mine that Gyorg will swallow when it performs an inhaling attack. However, the boss will only perform said move when Link is up close and particularly vulnerable to it. This requires Link to attack the chains with the Zora form's electric shield, which grants a speed boost that may lead to the player accidentally colliding with the mines. To make matters worse, Gyorg can swim through mines and destroy them, forcing the player to wait until they respawn.
  • The Garo Master, one of the minibosses of the Stone Tower Temple, is fast, has attacks that hit hard and cover a wide range, takes a surprising amount of punishment, and is nigh-impossible to hit in return. Unlike the normal Garos, trying to take him out by blocking his jumping attack and knocking his swords away won't work because he'll just bounce off your shield. When you do manage to hit him, he'll follow up very quickly with a counterattack. And like other Garo, he "dies without leaving a corpse", but the Garo Master does so with a bomb that can hurt Link, meaning his death animation can theoretically kill you if your life is too low.
  • In the 3DS remake, Twinmold became significantly harder: whereas, in the original, one could kill both the worms by hacking and slashing away at them with the Giant's Mask, the Giant's Mask here is unavailable until the first worm is defeated. Once you've donned the Giant's Mask, you have to first stun the red Twinmold by pummeling it with your bare hands at very close range, then perform a wrestling move to damage it. However, stunning it requires a good 15 or so hits, and the hit counter resets if the boss goes underground at the end of its flying cycle. The arena does have three boulders that you can pick up and throw to instantly stun Twinmold, but the boss requires four stun-and-damage cycles to kill. Although the battle can be cut down a cycle if you spin the Circle Pad while Link grabs its tail, this is an Easter Egg that few would realize.
• Gleeok returns in Oracle of Seasons, as do a bunch of other bosses from the original, but in OoS, he isn't the only boss that can try your patience, especially if you have the Biggoron Sword (which makes Gleeok's first phase drastically easier). Digdogger is especially annoying because you can only hurt it by using the Magnetic Gloves to pull a spiked ball into it—and towards you, and yes, it will hurt you if you don't let go in time—and Manhandla, a four-headed Piranha Plant that you have to fight with the Magic Boomerang, the most frustrating item ever implemented in the series.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker:
  • Molgera. You have to get up really close to grab his tongue with the hookshot, but get even an inch closer than you need to and he'll eat you. It's nearly impossible to L-target the tongue after the first time, because mini-Molgeras spawn and get in the way, and it's even harder to target it manually because they'll hit you and interrupt your careful hookshot maneuvering. So you have to kill the mini-Molgeras before you can attack Molgera after the first time, while keeping a distance from Molgera until then.
  • Puppet Ganon's third phase, since it is an obvious expy of Moldorm from A Link to the Past. Shoot a Light Arrow at the blue ball? Fine. Shoot a Light Arrow at the blue ball on the tail of a fast-moving snake that goes all over the place and never holds still? Better to shoot the guy who designed that phase. The worm form rockets around the room while you try in vain to shoot its butt with an arrow, fought in a room that is not particularly forgiving with its arrow or magic drops, can feel punishingly difficult.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap has the Giant Octorok. The main method of defeating it is to light its tail on fire with courtesy of the light coming from your lamp, but despite the thing's size, it's incredibly fast and will often pull a 180 on you before you can completely get behind it. It doesn't help that you spend much of the fight on an icy floor, which means it's nearly impossible to go the right way you want to half the time. And finally you need to stay close by the thing if you want to properly hit it, but this also gives it an easier chance of using its primary attack of sucking you up into its mouth on you. Even if it isn't using the suck attack you'll still automatically be swallowed if you're remotely near it, which can lead to your health being depleted very quickly.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
  • Twilit Bloat, aka the Giant Lightning Bug From Nowhere. You have to fight it on a ring of small platforms, it has a charge attack, and you have to jump on it and bite it to death. If you miss, it gets a free hit. Also, you're essentially helpless in the water, and when it does its rampage attack, the only way to be safe is if you have the agility of a cat on speed. The boss is especially hard if you don't realize you have to use the force field to target and hit all the legs at once.
  • The Darkhammer from the Snowpeak Ruins. He wields the Ball and Chain (which is the item you get for defeating him) and is fought in a narrow hallway which makes it very difficult to avoid. He is also only possible to harm from behind, meaning you have to wait for him to attack, clawshot your way across the room so that you are behind him, and then drop and hammer him before he turns around. That said, he is also the only boss or mini-boss in the game to lack Contractual Boss Immunity to the Mortal Draw. Seriously.
• The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks:
  • The Rocktites. A Giant Enemy Crab that waits on the roof of a tunnel and chases you through the mountain while you shoot its eye. After a while its eye only opens if you shoot an Explosive Barrel next to it, and finally it sends jumping minions after you as well. And it runs faster than your train, accompained by the nightmarish music that crescendoes as it gets closer.
  • Fraaz from the Blizzard temple for various reasons. His attacks are fairly tricky to avoid, and the ice/fire they leave behind then immediately have to be used against him with the boomerang once he switches elements. For extra fun, later on in the fight the boomerang needs to hit him multiple times before he launches the next attack. You have to do this with a measly four, maybe five hearts.
  • Phytops from the Ocean Temple is no joke either. Every time he recovers from a stun, he attacks with two tentacles in a rapid succession that is hard to dodge. In the second half, he also strikes with them during his normal attack pattern in a left-right-both combo that is equally hard to dodge and can easily throw you off the cliff, resulting in another half heart loss.
  • Skeldritch, the Sand Temple boss, can be a pain, especially due to the sheer longevity of his battle. The first phase consists of catching the boulders he shoots from his spine with the Sand Wand and manoeuvreing them onto catapults before launching them back. Sounds easy enough, but his last few vertebrae are only vulnerable from certain angles, and he continually escalates the speed and intensity of his attacks as the battle progresses. By the time you've reached the last two vertebrae, you'll constantly being floored by his rapid-fire boulder barrage before you can do anything useful, and if you do succeed in catching one, it would be crushed in short order by Skeldritch's next shot.
• The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword:
  • The first fight against Demon Lord Ghirahim (which is also the first boss fight in the entire game) is really frustrating, because he can catch your sword strikes with near-perfect accuracy. He's supposed to be a Wake-Up Call Boss that shows you that you can't just swing the sword around randomly and hope to win, but even when concentrating and misdirecting him, it's hard to land any hits at all. The fact that he does all this with one hand, lazily catching your sword between two fingers, just makes it more aggravating, as it's clear he's just toying with you. Although there would be two more similar fight, those are much more forgiving about it.
  • The second battle against the Imprisoned. The difficulty in this battle is upped considerably from the first fight, as the Imprisoned creates shockwaves with every stomp of its massive feet, making it impossible to come near it and Attack Its Weak Point unless you get really lucky with shield bashes. For people who simply jumped on his head he'll also throw you off after about a second. You're supposed to wait until Groose loads his catapult and stun the Imprisoned with that, but the downside is that this is a Timed Mission; you have to stop the Imprisoned from reaching the temple at the top of the map. In this battle, the boss can grab hold of a ledge and pull itself up, skipping a considerable portion of the map. You can slash his fingers when he's holding on but if you're way out of position you're stuck using the Groosenator. Which takes him roughly a minute to load after each use. It's not uncommon for a player to stun the Imprisoned with the catapult to land a few hits in, and while Groose is reloading have the boss pull itself higher. And if you save Groose for the times when the Imprisoned pulls itself up? Yeah, good luck approaching the boss with those shockwaves everywhere.
  • The third fight against the Imprisoned is more of the same, up until the spike is driven in. From there on out, it's all the player's aiming skill with the Groosenator, and you can't afford to miss. The first time, it's not so bad, as it's a bomb and those can hit anywhere (but if you miss, consider reloading your save file - the Imprisoned is flying). It's the final shot that's the clincher - you have to aim at the narrow traversable ground on the Imprisoned's head, especially near the spike, and that leaves little room for error. If you aim too low, Link falls, and with the geyser it's not going to be enough time before the rails are crushed and the Imprisoned begins its attack on the Sealed Temple. If you aim too high or too far to the side, it will be almost impossible to make it back in time (there's the central geyser that hops Link back to top, but the time window to use it allows no mistakes at all).
  • Scervo, the ridiculously frustrating miniboss of the Sandship. No Ring-Out Boss should ever have that much knockback. The fight takes place in a narrow, fenced-in "plank", so there's only one direction you can drive him out. And he's fast. He will hit you. A lot. It takes a second or two for Link to recover from the force and run back in, giving Scervo the chance to close the distance. And it's not enough when you finally manage to get him to the edge; you have to do it three times.
  • Dreadfuse, one of the Sky Keep's minibosses. He's even more frustrating than Scervo despite being encountered later because he will electrify his weapons for both attacking and defending.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds:
  • Zaganaga, the boss of the Desert Palace, is a tremendous pain. The arena is one big quicksand trap with small pillars that you can stand on dotted throughout it; the boss pops out of these pillars at random, and you have to use the Sand Rod to raise temporary platforms so you can get close enough to hurt him. Thing is, the temporary nature of said platforms means you may or may not have enough time to run all the way up to Zaganaga and slash him, and the whole time he spits out dozens of Peahats that fly into you and knock you into the quicksand. Making matters worse are the long-range beam attack he gains after he Turns Red, and the fact that he seems to have a lot more health than other bosses. At least the Sand Rod can be upgraded to the Nice Sand Rod so that the platforms it creates don't disappear, but it's not going to help too much with the Peahats and beam attack if you're not fast enough.
  • Knucklemaster replaces Mothula as the boss of Skull Woods, and it's no less aggravating. Its punch attack is very difficult to dodge, and requires quickly merging into a wall to avoid so it can crash into a wall and be vulnerable. Damage it more, and it gains a slamming attack that's also difficult to dodge, and destroys the ground you fight on, making it even harder to avoid its attacks. When it Turns Red, things go downhill fast. Its slams are faster, most of the walking space will be destroyed at this point, and every time it's left vulnerable, you'll get maybe three hits in before it starts attacking again. It can be skipped, but unless you've got a specific item to dodge its attacks, good luck.
  • Dharkstare, the boss of the Ice Ruins, is also a pain. First off, the arena is an icy surface, which means you'll slip all over the place, and is surrounded by a Bottomless Pit, and there's also a pit in the middle as well. Dharkstare never holds still, making it extremely difficult to melt its ice shield off with the Fire Rod, and it attacks by sending three energy balls out around your position in a triangular shape which after a few seconds freezes the area inside it. Unless you're already moving when it sends the triangle out, good luck not getting frozen. Oh, and when it Turns Red, it starts sending out a second triangle.
• The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes is designed around three individual Links sharing the board. Henceforth, levels and especially bosses often require very efficient co-operation between players (which is difficult online due to lack of voice chat and emotes not being able to communicate certain actions), or in single-player careful placement of Doppels and switching control between them on the fly. To be specific:
  • Vulture Vizier is only a miniboss, but his battle is a nightmare. The arena is a large balancing platform with no guard rails, with the boss sitting on a perch off to the side. The idea is for one or two Links to stand on one side of the balancing platform, giving the third Link just enough elevation to attack the boss' face. The slightest off-balance nudge sends all three Links tumbling into a bottomless pit, resulting in three hearts lost with nothing you can do to prevent it. It's even more fun when the boss' attacks include pecking the platform to violently shake it, blowing gusts of air to blow the Links around and dropping statues to weigh the platform down.
  • Moldorm is back, and in single-player he's more annoying than ever. Moldorm homes in and chases the Link you're currently controlling, and he's pretty fast, very accurate and has a very big hurtbox (and, as usual, high knockback on an arena with no guard rails). You must carefully place a Doppel and lure Moldorm close to it, then very quickly switch control to attack Moldorm's tail. When you switch control to a Doppel, Moldorm changes his target very quickly, so you only have less than a second to attack. What's more, although Moldorm can't hurt inert Doppels, he can push them over the edge, so you have to keep them all near the center.
• Hyrule Warriors:
  • The Imprisoned is back with a vengeance. He has most of his abilities from Skyward Sword plus a few new ones, and is just as much of a pain to deal with here. His toes are still his weak point, so you have to be constantly putting yourself in range of his stomp shockwaves to hit him, the size and damage of which can get ridiculous when he's low on health. On harder maps he can deal huge amounts of damage, screwing the player out of an A-Rank with only two or three hits. His sheer size combined with the game's tendency to put him in small arenas makes him difficult to maneuver around, and he's been known to stand in doorways and block off entire portions of the map. He also automatically stands up when his weakness gauge depletes by half, preventing the player from breaking it in a single round (he's the only boss in the game who does this) and will immediately follow it up with his belly slide attack which renders him completely invincible until it's over, causing fights with him to take much longer than the other bosses. And a few sadistic maps will making you fight multiple Imprisoneds at once. One of the reasons the "Defeat 1000 enemies in 10 minutes" mission is so difficult is that it throws four of these guys at you at once, with no time to kill them, forcing the player to try and grab kills while running for their life from a bunch of hungry, angry Imprisoneds. Legends makes him easier to deal with by negating his automatic getup, and rendering him vulnerable to Focus Spirit Knockdowns.
  • The fight against Gohma in the Faron Woods level of story mode has the potential to be a pain. Gohma itself is actually not that difficult, as its only really notable attribute is that it's invincible most of the time and only opens up its weak point, its eye, after using its eye laser, which is pretty easy to dodge roll away from anyway. The problem comes from the fact that Gohma is primarily fought inside the Deku Tree base; your home base for the level, which will cause a game over if you lose control of it. Even this isn't so bad; where the problem really comes in is actually your allies for the mission. Gohma is shielded most of the time and can only be stunned and made vulnerable by shooting it in the eye with an arrow; your allies do not realize this and will simply crowd around Gohma and allow it to beat them to death without contributing anything else to the fight. This makes the fight a race against time to bring Gohma down before it kills enough of your soldiers to constitute losing control of the base.
  • Manhandla is also very annoying to fight. It's a simple process: stun all four heads with the boomerang (though the game may let you away with three or two stunned heads), and whale on the crystal in it's body. The issue here is that one of Manhandla's attacks is to rain hell on you. It's multi-hit, and if you aren't blocking, it will stunlock you, reducing a full life meter to zero in seconds. The worst part is that it looks similar to another one of it's attacks, namely, the one where it opens itself up for an easy quadruple stun. So more often than not, you may throw your boomerang, and leave yourself open to the seedling gun attack.
  • The final fight against Volga, as he's been powered up by Cia to tremendous degrees, meaning he can kill you very quickly if you're not careful. You aren't actually supposed to fight him in this state, instead waiting for Zelda (or Ruto if you're playing as Zelda) to talk him into rejecting Cia's power before you can take him down, but this takes about a minute to complete, which is more than enough time for him to finish you off.
  • Volga in every instance is a brutal struggle, considering that he's the Zelda version of Lu Bu. He's fast, hits very hard with combos that are hard to break out of if he traps you in them, can turn into an invincible dragon for good measure, his weakness gauge pops up for about half a second at a time and it only appears after attacks that are difficult to dodge whilst still being close enough to attack afterwards, hardly uses the attacks that do cause the weakness gauge to appear, and he takes an absolute ton of hits to defeat.^note One saving grace, however, is that when Volga is hit while his Weak Point Gauge is up, it won't disappear for a few seconds, giving you enough time to drain it.
  • The fight against Cia is also a pain. The first portion of it is very easy, as she's just a regular humanoid enemy and can be knocked around accordingly, plus most of her attacks are very slow and require her to charge up power before she can even use them, which you can easily interrupt. The problem comes in the second portion, where she splits herself into four, and all four of them will often be on different places in her attack pattern, meaning you don't have time to stop all of their charge-up attacks. They also have a tendency of clustering together, meaning it's very difficult to get to one of the clones' whose weak point is showing without getting hit by the AOE attack of one of the others.
• Woe betide any fool who thinks Breath of the Wild is going to be an easy ride.
  • Guardians can sprinkle Link across the Hyrulean landscape with their lasers and instantly take off six hearts with a direct hit. Their lasers are very difficult to dodge, effectively leaving the player with two options on how to defeat them. You can either try shooting them in the eye to stun them and get some hits in (said eye has a small hitbox, and until you manage to acquire Ancient weapons and/or the Master Sword, it’ll take a while to whittle down its lifebar, especially early on in the game), or deflect their lasers with your shield (which requires very precise timing that will likely break your shield if you mess it up). Decayed Guardians are somewhat manageable due to being stationary, but Guardian Stalkers are much harder to deal with because they can follow you around, move around a lot to throw you off while trying to aim for the eye (unless you manage to cut off their legs), and require several laser deflections to defeat. Guardian Skywatchers are even worse as they can fly around and have more range. They are practically impossible to use melee attacks on unless you can manage to destroy their propellers with Bomb Arrows, and if they're high enough above you, you can't deflect their lasers with your shield, and finding cover from their lasers to get them to lose interest is also more difficult.
  • Lynels are notoriously strong and fast centaur-like creatures that know no shortage of ways to butcher the Champion of Hyrule. The best way to defeat them is with a perfect dodge, a difficult backflip that will let you unleash a flurry rush of melee attacks if you dodge at just the right moment, but if you don't time it right you will take a heavy blow from their axes. Freezing them with Stasis can make the fight easier, but you need three Ancient Cores to upgrade Stasis to do this, which can only be obtained by finding them in certain chests or as a rare drop for defeating the above mentioned Guardian Stalkers. Certain Lynel varieties can have an HP ranging from 2000 to 7000, comparable to Calamity Ganon depending on how many Divine Beasts you have freed by the final battle. Of particular note is the Lynel at Ploymus Mountain. Although it is one of the weakest Lynels, it's still more powerful than any enemy most first-time players are likely to have encountered at this point, as it is part of the Vah Ruta quest, which is likely to be the first Divine Beast that first-time players will go for due to being nearest to Kakariko and easiest to stumble upon. To board Ruta, the player must collect Shock Arrows from Shatterback Point (unless they already have at least 20 in their inventory), where this Lynel is roaming around, and the player will likely not have sufficient weapons and health to defeat it, unless they have done a lot of traveling and shrines before coming here. It can be avoided, as it doesn't have to be killed to get the Shock Arrows scattered across the area, but as entering Shatterback Point triggers a cutscene that makes it almost impossible not to be noticed (Link will be hiding behind a rock but the Lynel will head in your direction and eventually notice you whether you move or not), you'd have to leave Ploymus Mountain and make your way all the way back there once the Lynel stops shooting Shock Arrows at you.
  • Thunderblight Ganon, the boss assigned to Divine Beast Vah Naboris, is the boss that fights most like Link, and thus the boss that will make his life most miserable. Phase 1 has it throwing balls like it has a Thunderbolt Rod when it's not flash-stepping into Link's face to carve him up, leaving you a scant second to react for a Flurry; the boss' shield will chew at any small arms' durability, making a heavy weapon ideal... but only for so long. Phase 2 has it bring out the lightning, dropping rods that attract thunderbolts to fry Link if he's in range, and its sword and shield are now electrified, meaning Link will drop all metallic equipment he's holding when contact is made. Many players do not immediately realize the strategy to beating the beginning of the second phase (using Magnesis on the metal rods so he is struck with lightning), and afterwards he can be difficult to Flurry Rush. Take this boss lightly, and Urbosa will be waiting for you...
  • Aonuma said that you can face Calamity Ganon right away, but there is a vast difference between when you can face the beast and when you should. First off, every Divine Beast you've freed by this point joins in at the start of the fight to drain Calamity Ganon of an eighth of his health, totaling half his health if you've freed all four. However, if you go straight to Ganon you have to fight him at his full health, totally 8000 HP.^note For reference, garden-variety Moblins (the highest-health "common" enemies) have 56 HP, while each of the Scourge Ganons have 800 HP This thing has a wide variety of attacks, from Fireblight Ganon's blazing sword to Windblight Ganon's wind cannon to Waterblight Ganon's lance launcher, this thing copies a number of attacks, but its two unique abilities are what set it apart. First is its repulsor field; while this does no damage, if you're targeting the boss when it hits you, you lose a charge of Daruk's Protection, something this move appears made to do, and those charges are better used covering for you against an actual attack. Second, and more troublesome, is when it literally Turns Red via protective forcefield; this barrier protects it from all of your attacks, and only drops during its own attacks, leaving almost no blind spot. If you cannot Perfect Dodge, parry shots with your shield, or have Urbosa's Fury and/or Daruk's Protection as trump cards, this battle is unwinnable. Oh, and Calamity Ganon is preceded by every Blight Ganon you did not kill, including the aforementioned Thunderblight Ganon, meaning you've got a gauntlet from hell to go through if you choose to fight this thing straight away. Making this even worse is how Blights scale - facing them in their respective dungeons gives them 800-2000 HP with the last blight having 2000 HP due to HP scaling but facing Blights in the castle gives them 2000 HP EACH, meaning you effectively have to have enough equipment to deal a grand total of 16,000 damage before Master Mode regeneration. Charging Ganon with the four Divine Beasts on the loose is a masochist's delight. You Have Been Warned. And if all that wasn't bad enough, Master Mode adds one additional level of hellishness to the fight; Much like every other enemy in the game, his health regenerates. Not so much a problem in the first phase, but after he Turns Red, this leaves the rest of the battle an excercise in mind-boggling frustration as he becomes impervious to damage most of the time and all you can do is hope that he'll use the right attacks to allow you to counterattack before he's regained all the HP you knocked off him the last time you got to attack.
  • The illusionary realm rematches introduced in The Champion's Ballad generally keeps the difficulty of the Blight Ganons the same as they were the first time they are fought apart from reducing the inventory to some early healing items, the Champions weapons and a few backups; the exception is Waterblight Ganon. The battle only gives you ten arrows, which is not enough to kill him in the second phase where arrows are the best form of offence. This reduces the battle to using bombs (which requires getting close enough that there is little to no time to stop Waterblight Ganon's Cryonis attack and do Scratch Damage anyway), using Stasis to knock an ice block back at him (which costs durability in a battle with limited weapons) or good use of Perfect Guard, Daruk's Protection and Urbosa's Fury.
• After a disappointing showing in Breath of the Wild, Fireblight Ganon and Windblight Ganon bring their A-game in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity .
  • Fireblight Ganon attacks very slowly, but that slowness makes it hard to get the timing down for Perfect Dodging his attacks and exposing his weakpoint gauge, and will often end with you being smacked with a humongous sword or set on fire by his hair. When he's low on health however, he adds a devastating new move to his arsenal: a combo attack where he repeatedly strikes you with his flaming hair. It comes out a lot quicker than his other attacks which will throw you off your game completely, and if it connects you're going to lose a lot of hearts in a hurry.
  • Windblight Ganon is a skilled marksman whose massive laser blasts are tough to dodge, as are his tornadoes. The tornadoes in particular cover a wide area, and he fires them three-at-a-time which creates a painful wall of wind for you to deal with. Fighting him up close can take the edge off a bit... but it also makes it easier for him to hit you with his powerful laser rain attack.
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
  • Flux Construct III, a field boss that is the most powerful form of the Flux Construct bosses. In addition to hitting like a truck and requiring you to use Zonai springs (or a campfire and a pine cone for an updraft) to hit it in its flying form, its weak point is continuously moving, and has a tendency to move more quickly if you try to aim at it to hit it at range. Winning against it, especially early in the game when a single hit will take off most of your health (if not outright kill you), requires staying on your toes and reacting quickly whenever opportunities to damage it arise, but emerge victorious and you will be suitably rewarded with Zonai charges, Zonai devices (including rare Large Batteries!), and a core that can be used to fashion a heavy-hitting club.
  • Gleeok makes its first return to the series since Phantom Hourglass, and it returns in style as a massive three-headed dragon with powerful elemental attacks. They use their wings to blow you back and prevent melee attacks while launching either elemental beams or massive blasts of fire, ice, or lightning depending on the Gleeok (or all three if it's the King Gleeok). You'll need to snipe their heads to even get a chance at hitting them, which is made much harder by the fact that the heads are relatively small and move around a lot, meaning you'll need a lot of Keese Eyeballs for accurate shooting or a multi-shot bow like the Great Eagle Bow. Oh, and the three elemental Gleeoks can change the weather, forcing you to have equipment or an elixir ready. Once you get the beast to its last quarter of health, it will rise into the sky and launch a volley of fierce attacks, meaning you need to find a way to get up there before it turns you to dust — and this game does not have Revali's Gale.
  • A representative from the proper Temple bosses is Queen Gibdo of the Lightning Temple. Like other Gibdos, she's invulnerable until hit by an elemental attack, mainly arrows enhanced by Riju's lightning, but she can be hard to hit with her strafing. Once vulnerable, she tries to evade Link while occasionally stopping to fire off wide-range, heavy-hitting sandstorms. The true challenge comes in her second phase, where she activates the four hives in the room to constantly spawn Gibdos. The hives can be destroyed with Riju's lightning, but it can be difficult to aim with all the Gibdos on your tail, and while you're occupied with the hives, it's very easy to lose sight of the Queen flying around, and she hits like a truck.