That One Boss and That One Level cleanup.

Highly Responsive to Prayers

• Kikuri with her eye lasers. DAMN YOU, BRONZE DISK!!!

The Story of Eastern Wonderland

• Marisa Kirisame in her very first appearance as the stage 4 boss. She pulls out four multicolored orbs that all shoot danmaku in addition to the bullets coming from herself. Furthermore, she can cause them to spin around outward in a fashion that is very hard to anticipate and dodge. She becomes much easier when the orbs are destroyed... until she simply recreates them. She is also aggravating due to her tendency to fly down to the bottom of the screen, much closer to the player than most other Touhou bosses, which makes dodging her attacks harder or impossible.

Lotus Land Story

• Elly, mainly because of her scythe. She throws it at you in the middle of her patterns, which already require a fair bit of precision, it's slightly homing, and it blocks your shots. If you're playing a shot type that can't get around that it'll be a very long fight.
• When playing as Marisa, there's Reimu in stage 4. She is a nightmare to defeat, since she has several attacks that can either spawn very fast spreads of bullets, yin-yangs which are large and bounce off the sides of the play field in erratic fashions, or wall in the player and force them to dodge fast aimed bullets.

Mystic Square

• Mai and Yuki, the stage 4 bosses, are pretty frustrating due to the sheer amount of bullet spam coming from two different directions, as well as Mai's laser and small bullets. And that's when you fight them together. Depending upon who received the most damage, you fight the survivor, and it gets harder. Mai uses bouncing ice daggers and egg bullets that break into more bullets when your shots hit them. Yuki, on the other hand, just spams slow and fast patterns, but also uses fireballs that block shots.
• Yumeko, the penultimate boss of the game, is known for being a nightmare to defeat even for experts. While the difficulty of the game is gradually but steadily raised until her battle, she herself is a nasty difficulty spike. Half of her patterns require very fast reactions - she just throws some knives and bullets. But later, you have to deal with VERY tightly aimed streams of bullets/lasers AND knives she randomly throws everywhere. If you survive that, prepare for some very fast bullet walls followed by more knives... from both sides of the screen! Her final attack, which "only" requires dodging diagonally thrown daggers, seems easy by comparison. And since all of her patterns are speedy and need very good reflexes rather than good bullet trajectory reading, you will usually have to bomb in advance to avoid losing even more resources. Just watch this video...

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil

• Patchouli Knowledge, the stage 4 boss, is the novice Touhou player's greatest obstacle to completing the game without continues. Her spell card patterns are very random, and she tends to move around a lot, making her a challenge to hit. And God help you if you play as ReimuB, because ReimuB Patchouli is absolutely murderous.
• If you got past Patchouli, there is no chance to rest, as Sakuya comes very soon after. Her midboss pattern is specifically designed to box the player in. It does not help that she is the first user of that annoying dagger danmaku with a hitbox which seems larger than the actual sprite. Her stage 5 midboss spell card "Misdirection" can drop your lives quickly if you don't know exactly how to deal with it.
• Right BEFORE Patchouli, we also have Meiling, but her battle might be more of That One Spellcard than anything else, because of that accursed Rainbow Windchime spell.

Perfect Cherry Blossom

• The Prismriver Sisters come at the end of stage 4, which is already arguably the hardest non-extra level in Touhou. Yet again, the cards they use on you depend on your character choice, as well as which one of them you focus your shots on. Their nameless non-spell patterns fill the screen with a truly ridiculous number of bullets on higher difficulties. These are the same every time, so it's possible to find a safe spot and/or memorize them, but if you get hit even once while dodging them, Dynamic Difficulty kicks in and changes up the pattern, making memorization completely impractical.
  • The main downside to playing as Sakuya is you're forced to fight Merlin at the start of the Prismriver Sisters battle. Why is this a downside? Because Merlin's gimmick is homing lasers!
• Once you get past the Prismriver Sisters, there is another difficulty spike awaiting you — Youmu Konpaku. She keeps you company all the way to the final boss as miniboss of stage 5 & 6, but it's her boss battle that's evil. Her favorite method of attack is to throw dense AND rather fast (or just extremely dense) clusterfucks layers of bullets, while giving you about 3 seconds of bullet time to position yourself out of harm's way. In theory. You need a lot of practice to get used to this to the point you won't be reaching for the bomb key during every slowdown. Youmu singlehandely proves that reading-based spells can be just as hard as reaction-based ones. Demonstration.

Imperishable Night

• Both level 4 bosses, that is, either Reimu or Marisa.
  • Reimu uses heavily patterned, but extremely dense clusters of spell tags, fires off powerful homing shots, and boxes you into small areas with her attacks. In the second part of the fight, she's usually zipping all over the screen, making herself nigh-impossible to hit. Not so hard as she was in LLS, but really hard anyways.
  • On the other hand, Marisa's attacks are much less structured. She prefers to shower the entire screen with her deceptively large looking star bullets. Her first spell card generates spirals of huge stars, showers the field with tiny stars coming in from the sides, and adds periodic shotgun-style blasts from her familiars. Then you get to the second half of the fight...

Phantasmagoria of Flower View

• Aya Shameimaru. She's fast as hell, and it doesn't help the AI makes her excessively cheap, dodging almost everything you'll throw to her. Usually you will lose one or two lives trying to defeat her, before the RNG goes easy on you and lets you defeat her more easily, but even if you defeat her, you'll have yet to face Komachi / Yuka and Eiki Shiki, which is even worse than Aya in terms of AI cheapness. If the character you're using finds her as your 7th opponent, good luck in trying to clear the game in one credit with that character. You'll need it...

Shoot the Bullet

• "Seamless Ceiling of Kinkaku-ji". The nightmarish new impossible request of Kaguya Houraisan is impossible for many a player indeed. It starts as a seemingly doable pattern of falling almost half-screen bullet walls and a spinning layer of bullets thrown around the stage to make it harder to approach her. Said layer gets thicker after each successful photo and reaches a ridiculous level for the last one — it's one of the scenes many people simply don't have the patience to clear.

Mountain of Faith

• Aya, from the past main game, returns as the stage 4 boss. The luck factor is vital for that fight, especially the survival card almost at the end.

Subterranean Animism

• Parsee Mizuhashi, despite only being a stage 2 boss, has become rather infamous for surprising players with how difficult her spell cards are. "Green-Eyed Monster" is particularly brutal, as she uses it when she encounters the players as a midboss, and it's homing, a quality typically reserved for the bosses of stages 5 and 6 in a Touhou game. Another gimmick not normally seen until endbosses is the Doppelgänger Attack, which Parsee also uses her "Tongue-Cut Sparrow" spell cards.
• Yuugi Hoshiguma in stage 3 usually trips up players due to the sheer brute force of her attacks. Her final spellcard, "Knockout In Three Steps", is particularly brutal, because it's ensured you will lose at least one life if you don't know exactly what you need to do to pass this spellcard, and if you messed up... *pichuun*. She's often cited as a reason to not assume a character's strength from their placement in the game. One such argument spawned the NOT EVEN DROP meme.
  • The first spell card she uses, Oni Sign "Anomalies, Strength, Disorder, and Spirits" is rather hard even on Easy. Yuugi shoots out a spiral of danmaku that are facing ever which way, before they go out in haphazard paths. You can get in the way of the spiral to not make those shots appear, but it won't really help.
• Satori Komeiji can be this, depending on who your option is, as she uses that character's spell cards. Heaven help you if you're playing as ReimuC and aren't prepared for "Tengu Macro Burst" to come hurtling at you. If you are playing as ReimuA, then have fun with Yukari's "Border of Wave and Particle", which was part of the extra stage of Shoot The Bullet. And then there's MarisaB (Patchouli). Her torturous water cards are the ones that Satori chooses, even though one of them ("Princess Undine") isn't even one of the spellcards that Marisa remembers from her. Well, those and one of Patchouli's cards from the extra stage of EoSD, the "Philosopher's Stone".
• Orin is almost universally declared the worst of them all. For beginners, there's the non-spellcards from the cat form in the stage 5 battle. Not so hard as it seems, but you can get clipped easily. Then there's the infamous "Cat's Walk" / "Vengeful Cat Spirit's Erratic Step". If you don't read the card's pattern correctly, well... nice knowing you. And then, there's the actual boss battle. The zombie fairies are the least of your worries. Her third spell card, "Needle Mountain of a Former Hell" / "The Needles of Yore and the Vengeful Spirits in Pain", is really hard to read, due to the spinning ghost wheels, which are almost but not entirely unlike any other attack found in the series, and the bombs are useless against the wheels, so have fun.
  • Her final encounter in Stage 6. For those that played Battle Toads, remember the final part of Stage 3? It's basically that, that is, if you care about the spell card bonus.
• With this many That One Boss characters, some fans like to joke that Subterranean Animism is That One Game.

Undefined Fantastic Object

• Ichirin, together with Unzan, in stage 3. Be prepared to deal with Unzan's fists while you try to dodge the other bullets and lasers.
• Captain Minamitsu Murasa, the stage 4 boss. Giant anchors, literal raindrop dodging, and a homing survival card, all at stage four. If she doesn't mess you up, then...
• Shou Toramaru, the stage 5 boss, definitely will do it. Many people have great difficulty with her, especially with the curvy lasers. Her most notable spell card is Most Valuable Vajra / Vajra of Perfect Buddhism. The spinning homing lasers plus the other bullets make this card insanely difficult. It gives you so little opportunity to damage her, that with certain shot types it basically becomes a survival card too.

Double Spoiler

• Satori's "Vague Recollection of Kinkaku-ji". See that example in Shoot the Bullet section? Satori, being the troll she is, makes the players relive the horror again. This time, you only have to take 3 pictures... because the spell starts in the hardest mode. And the bullet pattern before the last photo is even harder than the original spellcard's hardest phase.
• Iku Nagae, the stage 10 boss.^note This game has 14 stages, being just a Boss Rush with no actual levels. Though she originated in the fighting game Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, and was not even the final boss in it, practically all her spell cards are a nightmare. Just try capturing "Pearl of the Five-Clawed Dragon" with Hatate, who makes every other card in the game easier. And then you get to "Dragon Palace Messenger's Swimming Shot", which feels downright broken. No strategy or trick works against its combination of completely random curvy lasers mixed with completely random large orbs with big hitboxes. This is the last scene most people clear, usually by pure luck, if at all.

Ten Desires

• Yoshika Miyako, the resident jiang-shi of Stage 3, has the annoying gimmick of absorbing spirits that emanate from her body to restore health. If you don't get close to her to intercept the spirits, she can easily deny a spellcard capture, even if you are wailing at her health the entire time. In addition, she fires large, spread out waves of kunai danmaku that can be very difficult to deal with, especially with a forward shooting character. And that's not even getting to the problems Youmu has...
• Seiga Kaku by herself is weak. However, being a Flunky Boss, she decides to bring in a bodyguard...which just so happens to be the previous That One Boss, which makes her incredibly hard to hit. Fortunately, you can take Yoshika out. Unfortunately, she'll come back to life after a few seconds.

Double Dealing Character

• Kagerou Imaizumi can be a contender of the hardest stage 3 boss in the series. All of her attacks come out very fast, fill the screen extremely quickly, and travel in random directions. “Triangle Fang/Star Fang” covers up 2/3 of the screens with random bullets, “Strange Roar/Full Moon Howling” can screw you up with a fast-moving wall of bullets if RNG decides against you. Finally, "Star Ring Pounce/High Speed Pounce" is a wide area attack that forces you to move around the screen and the boss can ram into you if you decide to stay only at the bottom or get in her way.
• Seija Kijin, the stage 5 boss. Do you remember Sakuya, Youmu, and Reisen and how their gimmicks screwed many players? Well... she goes one step further, having the power of turning anything over, and she'll be glad to use this ability against you. She isn't as strong as other bosses in terms of bullet spam, but she doesn't need any of that because of her ability. Her mid-boss spellcard fires bullets upwards that then Wrap Around to the bottom of the screen, which screws a lot of players up simply because of how used they are to dodging bullets coming from the top. Then, in the stage boss fight, she screws you over by flipping the screen horizontally and your controls with it in the first spell card and then vertically in the next. The third spell card works a lot like the mid-boss one, with one difference: Bombs are useless against the bullets this time around. Then, for her final spellcard, she rotates the screen 180 degrees every few seconds. The patterns themselves aren't terribly difficult by Stage 5 standards; it's the screen flipping and rotating and breaks from the gameplay norms that makes her attacks brutal.

Urban Legend in Limbo

• Byakuren, appearing only as the Taoist faction Final Boss. She can and will easily destroy those puny Taoists. The things that makes her hard are her Spell Cards. Almost all of them are ungrazeable, which in Danmaku fighting games means bad news. Her Occult Spell Card, however, takes the cake. It involves riding her motorcycle trying to ram your character, and it is very damaging and ungrazeable. Don't even try to guard it, as she will break it in a second. Worse, her occult orb is right AT the back of the motorcycle, meaning in order to stagger her, you have to be close enough to touch it AND far enough to avoid the motorcycle itself while she's zipping back and forth trying to ram you. Her second Occult Spell Card makes the first one look like Rumia's Spell Card; she's now driving in the background and foreground while throwing projectiles at you before trying to ram you at an even higher speed. As such, she can't be damaged for large portions of the Spell, and can be very difficult to hit without forcing you to eat damage yourself for those few moments that she returns on-screen. Worse, her occult orb is right behind the motorcycle, you have to time your jump correctly in order to touch it. Too early and you miss it, too late and you get rammed for massive damage. All in all, you're almost guaranteed to spend all your lives trying to beat her (for added bonus, you will hate motorcycles after this) until you learn her patterns..

Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom

• Ringo, the boss of the second stage. The game isn't particularly brutal up to that point and we get a slight taste of her corridor danmaku during her brief midboss fight. In her boss fight, however, she opens up with long, curving corridors of bullets that require rather precise movements, followed by Strawberry Dango / Berry Berry Dango — a brutal micrododging card with two overlapping layers of tiny bullets. After that, she also has a spell card that spreads bullets from multiple directions while restricting the player's movement by a ring of danmaku, and finally her September Full Moon / Lunatic September card, which is just pure micrododging of tiny bullets in density that is simply unheard of by stage 2 standards. And woe betide any seasoned Hard / Lunatic mode veteran who tackles the harder difficulties straight away, as her nonspells not only turn from straight bullet corridors into steep corridors that span most of the screen's horizontal length, but also get tighter and tighter, finally transforming into plain, tight, and fast grid of bullets to weave through and forcing the player to switch from macrododging to extreme micrododging in a splitsecond (reminiscent of Yukari's infamous Boundary between Wave and Particle spell card). All in all, Ringo singlehandedly sets the tone for the brutality of the danmaku of the Lunarian invaders and shows just why ZUN programmed the Pointdevice Mode into the game.
• Doremy Sweet, who is developing some notoriety in the fandom in the demo for having brutal non-spells. She has been compared to Stage 5 or Stage 6 bosses in difficulty, but she's only a Stage 3 boss! Her non-spells combine fast and slow bullets, she fires them in a swirl-like fashion, the bullets spin into themselves and you can easily get cornered. Her midboss card spawns bullets close to the player in all angles, her first boss card can wall the player with purple stars, her third boss card has lasers and bullets that bounce from walls, including the bottom one, might as well be an instakill if you are close to the bottom of the screen, her last card can spawn bullets close/on top of the player if it isn't careful. Her only easy attack is her second boss card, which uses fast swirls.
• Sagume Kishin, the stage 4 boss, keeps up with Doremy's level of challenge by swamping you with hundreds of the yin-yang orb enemies you've been fighting throughout stage 4. Her spellcards throw so many of them at you that at times it's tough to even damage Sagume, let alone capture her spellcards. Even without them, she's still perfectly capable of overpowering you, as her final spellcard proves. One shudders at the thought of how ungodly hard Sagume would be if she went all-out.
• Clownpiece, the stage 5 boss, gained early infamy in the fandom for the massive Difficulty Spike. Her initial non-spell is very confusing and then immediately followed up by a survival card. Yes, a survival card. This early in the fight. It even incorporates a massive moon that blocks out some of the other danmaku and forces you to estimate where the stream is going to continue instead of grazing along. Most of her cards somehow incorporate both lasers, some of which are directed at you Byakuren-style, and star danmaku in dense, fast waves which are nigh-impossible to navigate through. Some of her non-spells force you to micrododge to a hair-tearing extent and eats away your resources while you try memorize her patterns. It doesn't help that she uses a second survival-card at the end of her fight, utilizing her signature moons again. Granted, this might be her easiest spell, but like any respectable survival card, it can become tricky in the end. She is the One Boss in a game full of them, seen by many players as being harder than the Final Boss and the Bonus Boss and is undoubtedly one of the hardest bosses in the entire series. She shares with Air Man the honor of having a fanmade song which is primarily about how difficult she is to beat.

Fangames

• Labyrinth of Touhou has plenty of these:
  • Chen, of all people, can be absolutely devastating. Thanks to the area you fight her in being full of powerful magic energy, her speed is through the roof, allowing her to attack pretty much every second. And her main attack is an incredibly powerful physical attacks, at a point where over half your party consists of Squishy Wizards. And did we mention she's one of the first story boss of the game?
  • Youmu Konpaku, who is almost guaranteed to give you hell. For starters, she's teamed up with her ghost half who rains down status effects on your party, while she devastates your whole team with her absurdly powerful sword attacks. Thankfully, the ghost goes down fairly easily. Youmu, on the other hand, has a whopping 24,000 HP, with the most you're capable of doing at best is 1000 or so. And about half the characters at your disposal are weak to physical attacks, the only moves Youmu uses, and die to them instantly.
    • Judging by the above, you'd probably think that it's a good idea to focus on the ghost, considering that it has less health. You'd be very, very wrong. Upon it going down, Youmu goes completely insane with her attacks, using her powerful elemental attacks more often and also beginning to use Slash of Eternity, which is ungodly powerful.
  • Suwako not only has a ton of health and constantly swaps between having high physical and magical defenses, but due to how her fight is triggered you will NOT be ready the first time you fight her.
  • The Eientei trio, against whom you must kill Eirin and Kaguya at the same time or else face an instant game-over from either Astronomical Entombing or Danmaku Barrage.
    • Luckily, characters high Spirit Affinity can resist them somewhat, so equipping characters like Komachi with the +128 SPI affinity item helps a lot
  • Yuyuko, a.k.a. "Whoops, here's a multi-target attack with 200% chance of instant death. As my opening move and randomly once my health gets low." This forces you to gear your party members with equipment that has Spirit and Death resistance, which can potentially lower your overall damage output.
  • Flandre, whose Laevatein obliterates anyone not with tankish stats and about 500 FIR affinity. Her Slash Dive also instantly kills anyone not having absurd amount of HP and physical defense.
  • Yukari, who uses Djinn "I totally cribbed this from Golden Sun" Storm to drain all SP from ALL your characters (including those in reserve). And she'll always use it in battle twice, including once just before her Turns Red phase where she starts buffing all of her stats.
  • Rinnosuke, who has an absurdly long fight filled with several different forms, and is capable of inflicting every status effect in the game. To add insult to injury, they can switch between their elemental forms if you don’t damage them enough, and the ones that are inactive regain health. You could have one form on the ropes, only to have Kourin to switch to a brand new form with full health. By the time you take that form out, the first one will have, more often than not, come back to full health. And much like Yukari, his final form has a full buffing move in World Shaking Military Rule, which buffs all of his stats by 66%, guaranteeing a full-wipe when he uses Start of Heavenly Demise as his next move.
  • Bloody Papa. Two words: "Strengthen Jutsu" and “Papa's Washing Machine.”
  • Hibachi #1 and 2, who are like Eirin and Kaguya, only even more unforgiving, and with relatively infinite DEF or MND.
  • Utsuho, who busts out Giga Flare from out of nowhere without any warning at all during low health. If you're not expecting Mystic attacks on a Fire-based boss, then you are screwed.
• Labyrinth of Touhou 2 has a few fun ones as well:
  • The Lesser Golem FOE on floor 3 is a Luck-Based Mission, simply because, when first met, only Rumia can reliably damage it. And the Golem's powerful physical attack will kill Rumia in one hit. If she winds up taking a hit, your only out is hoping you can debuff its mind enough with Kogasa and inflicts Silence to further lower its mind with Parsee or Kasen that Marisa becomes capable of dealing damage, and even this may not be enough.
  • Komachi is fought on floor 3, before the party has a chance to craft or find a lot of anti-death equipment. While it is possible to make Youmu tanky and resistant enough to deal with Short Life Expectancy (as it only hits your leftmost character), this leaves the rest of the party open to Ferriage in the Deep Fog, a full-party move that can also inflict Death. At low health, she'll do Narrow Confines of Avici to pepper your team with statuses and debuffs before pulling out Scythe that Chooses the Dead, a beefed up version of Short Life Expectancy that can strike anyone in the party.
  • The Lamprey Serpent FOE appears on both floors 4 and 5, well before you're ready to actually kill it. This is because of its Bite attack, which does tremendous amounts of damage and has good delay. The fact that it can start causing instant death below half life tends to not be much of a factor because an unprepared party will likely be destroyed before it can bring the FOE that low, and a prepared party will likely bring the death-resistant Komachi in as the tank.
  • On floor 5 is Hina, who possesses the Biorhythm of the Misfortune God attack to heavily debuff everyone on the field, and then uses Misfortune Reversal to flip her debuffs into buffs before pummeling the party with her party-wide magic. She also counters Heavy, Slience, and Terror by casting Spinning Around More Than Usual, again buffing herself in the process. Old Lady Ohgane's Fire is also her most powerful attack, capable of killing several of your frontliners if you weren’t expecting it.
  • Tenshi Hinanawi on Floor 9 is a major brick wall to most players. She has absurdly high defenses, a variety of moves to cripple your party members and kill anyone weak. Her Sword of Hisou also kills anyone with buffs going over 100%, forcing to keep watch and maintain your buffs moderately. State of Enlightment buffs her already absurd defenses by 100% so you have to debuff her if you want to have any chance of dealing damage to her. Even then, unless you invest most of your stat in attack or magic, you won’t see a huge number inflicted on either. Inflicting Heavy and Silence helps further debuff her defense and mind by half, however, the game never tells you these reduction effects.
    • Her final fight on 12F also pulls a big nuke every turn if she has any debuff at all. Good luck killing Tenshi with high defensive stats without using debuffs!
  • You have to fight in order to recruit Remilia and Sakuya this time (as well as progress, as they block the 11F stairs), and they make you earn it. When her health is lowered enough, Sakuya will bring out Private Square, an unblockable team wide paralyze, to effectively give the bosses some free turns. And if you think you're being smart in reducing the hits you take by going for Remi first, she'll use Blood Drain, which buffs both bosses and steals half of Sakuya's HP, meaning her next action will likely be Private Square. And to top it off, once one boss goes down the other one starts buffing and pulling out the really big guns. Either Remilia beefs all of her stats up with Curse of Vlad Tepes or Sakuya buffs her speed like mad with Luna Clock.
  • The Golden Mirror is when the non-character bosses really start to get annoying. With sky-high defense and lower-but-still-high magical defense and a massive amount of resistance to mystic, spirit, dark and physical. It also gains free magic boost every turn, forcing you to kill it quickly. It's difficult to get good damage in while its Ancient Curse attack rips up anyone with weak magic defense and drops a bunch of statuses onto the survivors. Oh, and it's got World Devouring Calamity, better known as Djinn Storm, to throw at you at 33% HP.
  • The Magatama is considered another brick wall. It has high stats across the boards and gains free speed every turn. It gains a recognition of the only boss having both Black Universe and Half Moon Slash. The former reduces the target’s HP to 1 while inflicting it with various status effects, and the latter halves the HP of all frontliners and kills anyone with 1 HP. Oh, and it's got World Devouring Destruction, which is just like World Devouring Calamity but on your HP instead.
  • Yuuka on floor 8 is absurdly fast and powerful. She can heals and buffs herself. The fight essentially relies on how often she uses Gensokyo’s Reflowering to heal herself by 1/10 of HP. She also uses Master Spark when low on health, which instantly wipes out your party if you don’t defeat her in time and evasion RNG decides against you.
  • Pretty much all Enhanced Bosses are this. They are the super beefed-up versions of all non-Touhou bosses you fight throughout the game, only extremely hard to beat. Their stats are insanely high across the board. Even the easiest Malignut Eater will give you a trouble. Special Award goes to Poisonous Wasp’s Shadow, which has insane amount of attack and speed. Unless you have been grinding at floor 20 and extra floors to boost your level, stat bonus, library point and resistances, you won’t be able to beat them.
  • The fights with Extra Bosses are also this:
    • The Great “C” summons four more clones of itself. You must kill them all before one of them gets a turn or it will respawn all lost ones next turn with full HP. Oh, each one also has an access to Black Universe and mind-ignoring attack. Each one is also invincible until they takes an action on their first turn.
    • The Second Sun has extremely high magic and magical defense. It also can switch your party members’ position as many as it feels like it.
    • Desire-Eating Demon has the highest speed in the game. It has high defense and even higher magical defense. It instantly kills your random party member on the fourth turn and every second turn onwards.
    • Guardian of the Crystals spawns 4 crystals to aid it in battle. Each of the crystal is extremely powerful and can cripple your party in a different way. Fire crystal has insanely high attack, Water crystal dispels your buff, Wind crystal buffs all of its allies and Nature crystal can heal one of its allies. The guardian is also troublesome. It can heal per the number of crystal alive. It has a variety of powerful moves, including Dark Star which dispels its own buff or debuff once it reachs a certain point and deals a heavy damage to you so you cannot debuff the guardian too much. If you decide to kill all of the crystals, the guardian will also spam buffing its own stats and thus casting Dark Star.
• Patchouli Knowledge in Koumajou Densetsu, lagely thanks to her "Philosopher's Stone" attack which deals a large amount of damage, is tricky to dodge, tricky to follow up with a comeback and follows an attack with homing bullets, making it all the harder to exploit the brief moments where she is open.
  • The sequel has three TOBs. First of all Konpaku Youmu who attacks the player in an area where water reaches up to Sakuya's torso, severly crippling her mobility, and at higher difficulty settings her ghost-half also fires bullet barrages when hit, forcing the player to time his/her attacks to make sure the ghost-half is not accidentally caught in a stray slash. The second example is Marisa, who has likely claimed more extra lives with her laser barrage than any other single attack in the game. The third one is Yuyuko, who has two boss gimmicks: The first one is a red butterfly that slowly follows you throughout the fight and is a One-Hit Kill on touch. The second gimmick is that many of her bullets do not cause Mercy Invincibility, or even make you flinch, so if she nails you with a line of butterflies, you're pretty much dead. In addition to this, she also throws a LOT More Dakka than any boss fought up to this point.
• Megumi Yaobi, the stage 5 boss from the fangame Marine Benefit. She has the gimmick of flooding the screen while giving the player a bubble to stay in; if your hitbox leaves the bubble for even a millisecond, you die. On top of that, she moves constantly all around the screen, making it very hard to actually deal damage to her. For her last nonspell, she even circles the screen while spraying bullets everywhere. And when you think it's over, she pulls out her survival card, The Eight Million Laughing Gods, which is That One Attack to end them all. It's not unheard of to lose two or three lives to this one card.^note The latest version nerfs EMLG somewhat, largely removing the threat of the moment which in previous versions was almost guaranteed to kill you, but even after the nerf the card still requires a lot of very precise movement at awkward angles.
  • As if this weren't enough, she shows up again as the stage 6 midboss, and deliberately goes out of her way to block your path through the bubbles with the biggest projectile available to her - Megumi Yaobi. If you aren't prepared for this, and are just watching the bullets and the bubbles while paying no attention to the boss, as is typically expected of the player, you WILL die. And even if you are prepared, the attack is nightmarishly difficult to read, considering how the bullets come from absolutely every direction possible for bullets to come from, all at once, without any pattern to speak of. Arguably the hardest attack in stage 6, and the player hasn't even seen the final boss yet.
• Alice in Paper Tenko. You first face off a giant puppet with 60 HP that hits you for 4 to 5 damage per turn when at this point you'll have around 30 HP at best. Then you face a 50 HP Alice. When at this point your HP was reduced to single digits, Alice will summon mooks constantly so you can't damage her with any attacks except the Celestial Stone Drill, launch said mooks at you for an attack that deals 10 HP damage, 9 if you time your button presses correctly. If you didn't stock on healing items back at Nitori's shop, this will be a very painful battle.
• Utsuho in her Phantasmagoria Trues incarnation. She's only faced in Unlimited difficulty, but in every other difficulty, you had two options for who you faced in stage 4; in Unlimited, you're forced to fight Utsuho. This is a problem, since despite being only the stage 4 boss, she's actually harder than she was in Subterranean Animism — where she was the final boss! Her danmaku is ridiculously fast, to the point where in some patterns you can get killed by a bullet that didn't exist half a second ago, while her smaller bullets move in very awkward ways and love to wall the player at any opportunity they can get. All of this isn't getting into That One Attack, Suppression "Hell's Helix", consisting of constant shifting walls coming at the player relentlessly from the sides. Or the fact that in this game, Utsuho's suns are entirely hitbox, while in Subterranean Animism, they were almost entirely hitbox — this may look on paper like a distinction without a difference, but in practice, far from it. Next to Utsuho, even Eiki Shiki in stage 5 feels like a Breather Boss in comparison.
  • And then there's Ran Yakumo. She isn't a Bonus Boss in this game, but when you get to Stage 3 on Advanced difficulty, you will desperately wish she was. Her patterns feature enormous walls, so large they can potentially cover a third of the screen or even more, as early as her first midboss nonspell, which is followed by a spell that features walls with tiny gaps coming at you from both sides at once. Then it's taken From Bad to Worse with her actual boss battle, where she greets you with a survival card that forces you to get ridiculously close to the red targeting circles that signify imminent death or else you die instantly — but don't actually touch the circles, or you also die instantly. And it doesn't get any easier from there, culminating in her final spellcard which constantly throws glowing walls at you from multiple directions, followed by a stream of knives that you need to dodge at the very bottom of the screen - when the angle of the walls Ran had been throwing at you made being high on the screen seem like the right strategy.
• Tarumi Takenouchi, the fifth stage boss of Riverbed Soul Saver. She isn't content to just use one gimmick against you; no, she'll throw something different at you with almost literally every attack she performs. Trying to wall you, shooting bullets at you from every conceivable direction all at once, doing so again while actively chasing you down, throwing giant fists at you, then throwing anchors at you in case you weren't already having horrible flashbacks to Undefined Fantastic Object. And what's her final attack? All of the above at once. Not even Liberation mode is likely to save you here.
  • Not helping matters any is that she showed up as the stage 4 midboss...and she was a total pushover then. After the brutal Wake-Up Call Boss in stage 4, and That One Midboss earlier in stage 5, most new players are relieved to see her as the boss, expecting a Breather Boss fight. They'd be very, very wrong.
• After the Wake-Up Call Boss of stage three comes Mochizuki Ichiyou, the fourth boss in Book of Star Mythology. She has criminally speedy nonspells and difficult puzzle spells that are borderline unfair to any person going through the game the first time. Most players going in blind lose around three lives by the time her first two healthbars are down, due to the following:
  • Her first attack throws out a huge spread of never-seen-before^note Unless you captured the second boss' Last Word warning lines, and in less than a second she then fires ludicrously fast shuriken along those lines, ensuring a player going in blind almost-surely dies immediately.
  • Then her first spell (in Hard/Lunatic) has six/eight clones fire kunai at you such that you must follow a very specific pattern to dodge them.
  • Her second nonspell has her envelop the whole screen with red shuriken, after which she fires kunai at them to have them burst very explosively into arrowhead bullets.
  • Her second spell (in Hard/Lunatic)^note Leaf Veiling "Nindou is Known to be the Act of Vanishing" and Covert Activity "-NINJA- The Overlords of History's Darkness" is arguably That One Attack, with actually-impassable walls spawning over and over on the screen as she throws extremely dense kunai waves at you. See for yourself.

• The Tribe Stage in Spore, when you take an aggressive stance and attempt to attack other tribes. A friendly stance makes it hideously easy.
  • Doing the tribal stage on aggressive isn't QUITE as bad if you bribe the other tribes first with a gift basket and then attack them one by one ensuring that you won't be attacked by the other tribes while you're away fighting. But there's still a ridiculous difference in difficulty between passive and aggressive.

Aside from having incorrect indentation, stages in Spore aren't really levels (they're more like Ages in Age of Empires), and even if they were, it's more "there's a clearly superior strategy" than "this is fucking hard".

• Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy:
  • Mountain Pass, the vehicle level from hell. It has one-hit-kill exploding barrels, dodgy environmental collision detection and obstacles that are impossible to avoid without slowing down or playing the level again twice, all on a bike-type vehicle that already has a wide turning axis. Oh, and to cap it all off, IT'S A RACE!!

Aside from the hyperbole, it's… not hard? I mean, I passed in a couple tries back in middle school.

• Snowy Mountain: It's massive, has lots of annoying jumps and has ice everywhere, which really hinders your jumping and makes it a real pain to navigate through certain areas. Especially when you're trying to activate the switch for the yellow eco-vents, as getting there requires you to make several tricky jumps from the ice on to moving platforms and also avoiding getting pushed off by the machines
• The Precursor City. Full of electrified water and various timed puzzles/arcades, and most of rooms have two floors with return to first floor being long and tedious most of time should you accidentally fall down. Then there is Outrun The Dark Eco passage and platforms that circle around another should you stand on it, which makes getting to distant platforms longer than it should be.

Both of those have the same problem: they're annoying and hard to navigate, but not "throw the controller at the screen" hard. They're not the sort of place you die every second in.

• Jak II: Renegade:
  • Most of the game could count, considering how hard it is, but a major offender is the Hellcat mission. And the Escape from the Water Slums. Hint: it's possible to punch your way out; simply keep hitting the square button. JET-boarding your way to safety also works if you know the route well enough.

First of all, "most of the game could count" has no place in this trope. Second, "Hellcat mission" is ZCE. Third, the Escape from the Water Slums is hard, but not more frustrating than most of the missions, and the example is also a ZCE.

• DAMN YOU INVISIBLE METALHEADS! Also, the march to the Metal Head leader which is topped off by the boss himself.

ZCE.

• The final boss arena only provides ammo for one of your guns, the Blaster (the yellow semi-auto rifle). Dying does not reset the ammo on your guns. The result of these two facts is that if you use all your Peacemaker and Vulcan Fury ammo on the boss and then die, you now have to face him down with your Blaster (because that's the only thing you can now hit him with). It takes 90 shots to kill him this way. Also, if you use all your Scatter Gun ammo on the hordes of scorpion metal heads, you must now pick them off one by one with a highly accurate but slow firing rifle; or risk getting hit fighting them at melee range.

Less "hard level" and more "dearth of ammo".

• The mission where you have to destroy the walking bombs that are headed for Torn's hideout. Each one takes a TON of firepower to destroy and peppers you with bullets if you get so much as an inch too close. (Crashing a motorcycle into one first helps.) Additionally, you have to navigate your way through the city in the most timely manner possible in order to meet the strict time limit. And, of course, this is an illegal mission: hello Krimzon Guard! hint:Get underneath the bots, and they can do nothing against you.

Not harder than usual for the game.

• The tank chase during the 'Blow up ammo at fortress' mission is particularly hard one early on in the game.

This one actually is the most frustrating part of the game (aside from that stupid hoverbike race against Errol), but this is a ZCE.

• The carry the eco transport mission near the beginning of the game is a pain as well. Among the few known methods to complete it are flying over the water while being chased, with an extremely weak scooter as your mandatory transport. Much of the difficulty resides in not knowing anything about the area you're being chased through initially - it's a narrow, winding maze of alleys.

Not harder than the rest of the game.

• Another difficult early mission is escorting Sig through Pumping Station. While Sig is thankfully more than able to defend himself unlike some other examples (see below), you have to wander through place infested by Metal Heads which are Stone Wall by this point of game while having only short-to-mid-range shotgun for your defense that is painfully slow, and enemies have mid-range attacks, so you have to be in their damage range to even be able to hurt them. Of course then there are moments where Sig is occupied by charging Peacemaker to shoot a distant target while unable to doing anything else, so you have to protect him from any incoming damage (and if he takes hit, his charging process resets to square one). And just before the end, you'll get ambushed by mentioned hearty Metal Heads and his gun jams...

Ditto.

• The boost ring race against Erol is particularly rage inducing. The course is long and difficult, pedestrians get in your way and slow you down when hit with alarming regularity, and your opponent will do everything in his power to push you off course, since missing a single ring causes you to fail the mission. Even worse, Erol has no such restriction; in fact there is one ring in particular that he almost never actually bothers to hit. Rubber-Band A.I. is in full effect. As an added "screw you" to the player, winning the race opens up some new side missions for precursor orbs — one of which is, you guessed it, doing the whole race over again!

Fuck that race with a stick. Definitely TOL.

• The mission where you escort Krew's men into the sewers. You're forced to protect three A.I.s who offer little to no help during the mission from Metal Heads. The Metal Heads in particular that you fight have the ability to shoot lasers, so God help you if they get the jump on you when they're offscreen. The true kicker is the last leg, which has an auto-save that doesn't trigger, involves a giant swarm of these metal heads attacking you all at once. If any of the A.I.s die, you have to restart the mission from the beginning.
• The Underport missions are notoriously hard for quite a few reasons. One is that the game has Checkpoint Starvation in many levels, including this one. The first half is underwater, forcing Jak to head for blue beams to regain air. There are lots of mines and Metal Head jellyfish that take off a lot of health, and at the end, you need to jump over a large gap that is just barely reachable with the walker you're using. The second half is an Escort Mission with Sig, where you need to solve a few puzzles and escape a large millipede Metal Head. If you die at all during this point, your ammo isn't reset, and worse, there are no ammo crates anywhere; if you lose all ammo, the game is Unwinnable. Talk about Harder Than Hard.

Again, not harder than the rest of the game.

• From Empire at War in the Star Wars universe comes the fifth Empire Campaign mission, where you have to destroy a powerful Rebel space station - when they have a higher population cap than you and get free reinforcements. The best part? While you're attacking the station, two Mon Calamari Cruisers come in from behind you, and you're required to kill them. Good luck.

Not that hard to beat if you have a grasp of the units you have. Hell, it's not as bad as Rebels 9 where you have to protect a space station from waves of Imperial ships.

• Every single stronghold mission in Soulstorm is That One Level. Tau can attack anywhere on the map with a ridiculously powerful cannon and, like the Orks, possess multiples of their most powerful units (their numbers are supposed to be limited to one or two). Imperial Guard can build multiple Baneblades if their factories aren't watched carefully. Space Marines frequently send fully-upgraded squads directly into the player's forces. Both Necrons and Chaos can spawn their two most powerful units at a moment's notice. Eldar have half a dozen hidden bases, each with massive rushing potential. Dark Eldar only allow a base to be built halfway through and spam their special abilities. The Sisters of Battle stronghold is the worst though, possessing an invincible unit that causes everything else near it to become invincible as well. The only way to defeat it is by destroying four icons: said unit immediately teleports if one of them is under attack.

If they're all TOL, then probably none of them are. They're just harder than standard.

• Battle for Wesnoth the mission Costly Revenge in the "Legend of Wesmere" campaign. Your second-in-command Landar has gone crazy and decided to enact some ethnic cleansing on the local Saurian tribe in revenge for an earlier raid, deciding to kill all of them and burn their villages. The shamans in your army are appalled and withdraw their support. This mission is a colossal pain in the ass because
  • You have no source of income due to burning down all the villages, so it is impossible to recruit units once you run through your starting gold.
  • You have no source of healing for your injured units due to losing access to your druids and destroying the villages.
  • You have no access to Woses, which regenerate and are strongly resistant to the types of damage Saurians can inflict.
  • Saurians are just generally annoying to fight.

It's a difficulty spike, but it sets you up for the rest of the campaign (not to mention that it comes in the last quarter of the campaign, so whaddya expect?). Also, indentation.

• The Force Unleashed. The beginning of the very last level, in the Death Star hangar. You start out in the middle of what basically amounts to all of the biggest pain-in-the-ass enemies all deciding this man with a lightsaber would be very nice to step on for a while. You'd think having a lightsaber would help, but now; it can't deflect half the attacks thrown at you, and there's virtually no cover. If you're out of sight of the snipers, the AT-S Ts and Purge Troopers'll get ya. If you can find a corner to hide in, you're not going to be able to hit anyone. If you don't find the not-entirely-obvious exit door, or take too much time to get it open once you (finally) kill everyone in the room, your enemies will keep respawning ad infinitum. God help you if you haven't mastered the controls and leveled up every last stat you have.
  • The trick to that portion is that you start very close to the exit door (its the floor). The room is entirely avoidable if you just use a force explosion to blow open the door. You'll fall right through and start a cutscene.
  • Arguably worse is having to pull down an entire Star Destroyer from the sky. Actually, you just have to hold the analog sticks, except that each time you have to align it just right, then fight some TIE fighters, during which time the Star Destroyer has time to go back to how it was before!
    • And the onscreen prompt lies about which direction to pull the stick in! Anyone doing this without a guide will never figure out what they're doing wrong.
    • On the PS3 version at least, it does actually indicate the correct direction if you look at it carefully, but at first glance, yes, it does look like it's indicating the wrong direction to move the sticks. The strange directions don't help either.
  • The canyon on Raxus Prime. The combination of enemies with knockback and insta-death endless drops is...troublesome.

The only "throw your controller at the screen" hard level out of those listed is the #%!$% ISD one — the on-screen instructions are flat-out misleading and there's very little room for error. It's definitely Difficult, but Awesome once you pull it off, though.

• Star Wars: Battlefront II. The ewok level. It's bad enough when they are so small that it's hard to kill them, but when the rest of your AI team cannot hit them,well then you have a problem.
  • Kashyyyk might as well be a suicide mission, as players must fight off wave after wave of enemies trying to hold long enough to fall back. First on the beach than the walls and finally the refinery. The refinery is probably the worst part since it is large and easily damaged by enemies who will swarm to attack it.

(Indentation.) I'm not sure whether Endor counts — it's definitely a pain in the Empire Galactic Conquest because it's poorly balanced, but it doesn't appear in the campaign; it's just a multiplayer map. The painful campaign missions are Polis Massa (hello, unbalanced map!) and Hoth (though its TOL-ness is debatable; it's the last mission after all).

• The sections of Crysis which places the player in a tank and a VTOL transport are generally considered greatly inferior to the rest of the single-player game. The tank cannot be repaired or rearmed, so must be abandoned when it has taken too much damage, and the VTOL is fairly difficult to maneuver accurately. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that you are forced to engage alien flyers in combat, something which is quite frustrating.
  • The tank mission is nothing compared to the first alien ship mission with instakill aliens who are hard to aim at, and no gravity, and no map makes getting lost easy. Mercifully this mission was removed from the console ports of the game.

Both of those are less "this is so hard" and more "Scrappy Mechanic".

• Star Wars: Battlefront II has several unbalanced maps, but the worst offender is Polis Massa, where the CIS/Rebel faction spawns soldiers in the hallway ahead of one of their starting command posts. This makes it nearly impossible for the Republic/Empire to hold on to their forward base even early in the match and extremely difficult to recapture, cutting down their reinforcements and making it very difficult to win. The Republic/Empire's best strategy for winning is to take a fully-loaded tank outside the facility, actually capture the CIS/Rebel bases from behind and let them have their own starting bases, reversing the imbalance, but it's extremely difficult to pull off. Capture the flag mode on this map is a little more popular for multiplayer... but it still lags really badly most of the time. Even worse during Clone Wars because unlike every other faction, the CIS is able to go outside without dying from being unable to breathe, since they're droids.
  • Naboo, because of how the command points and chokepoints are arranged, funnels every soldier into a messy and difficult battle for the centre that will cut through most of your reinforcements in about a minute. Helping defend the centre will result in enemies circling around to take your other points, and if you're clever and circle around yourself your allies will lose the centre, giving the enemy army a powerful advantage. It's even worse for the Rebels, as they don't get any vehicles while the Empire gets tanks.
  • Hoth, if you're playing as the Rebels. In theory, it's well-balanced, with both sides having access to vehicles, the Empire having more powerful weapons and the Rebels having better bases. The problem is that the vehicles aren't balanced unless there are two human Rebel players per vehicle. The airspeeders are able to take out the AT-ATs using the tow cable attack from The Empire Strikes Back, but doing so is virtually impossible unless the airspeeder has two human players on board, as the AI rarely pulls it off and there's now a delay between firing the tow cable and teleporting back into the pilot seat to prevent a single pilot from breaking the game. In other words, the Empire has two almost-indestructible weapons platforms which it can park in front of a Rebel base and spawn a constant stream of reinforcements from.
    • Even if the AT-ATs don't get you, Imperial troops can enter the base from the back if they take the Rebels' outermost command post. Trying to defend the base while everyone else is out trying to fly airspeeders is difficult, and doing so gives the Empire a chance to move the AT-ATs into position and spawn troops from them. And if you survive that, the Empire will control most of the map by this point and be able to regroup before you can grab any other command posts.
  • Endor as the Empire has more or less the same issue. There are Ewoks everywhere, who are small enough to conceal themselves in the grass, can pretty much one-shot the Imperials, and don't count against the Rebel reinforcements if you decide to start making teddy bear-skin rugs out of them. There's traps against your major vehicles that make them nearly useless, since you'll get blown up if you try to move more than five feet. This is all on top of the usual horrid AI, especially for whichever team the player is on, meaning that you'll be pretty much doing the work of twenty men while everybody else spawns in solely to get themselves killed and sap away your reinforcements. What makes this even worse is that the map is bugged so that, if an Imperial soldier gets killed, it counts as two kills on the reinforcement counter instead of one. The only way the player can win as the Empire is to immediately start out the match by gunning a speeder bike to the Rebel command post on the other side of the map and close in from both fronts. It's possible, but it is very easy to crash the speeder bike if you don't know what route to take and there is a good chance the spawning Rebels will kill you quick even if you reach the command post.

(Yes, this has an entry in the TPS and FPS pages, probably because you can play it as either.)
All of those are "those multiplayer maps are unbalanced", not "holyshit this level is hard".

• "Hoth - Our Finest Hour", the final mission of the campaign, is a nightmare. There are four different points to capture, requiring that you fight through hordes of Rebels by yourself (the Rebels, as typical, have infinite reinforcements; you don't) for each one, because, again as usual, your allies are less than useless. The first two are separated by vast open areas that provide no cover from the absurdly accurate snipers, and not even Darth Friggin' Vader helps with capturing the final one, as those same snipers will eat through his health in only a few shots. Then you have to place a bomb under a transport protected by more Rebel swarms and about a dozen autoturrets, then defend it for a minute so it isn't destroyed (and if it is you have to do the entire mission again).
  • The Tantive IV mission. The corridor battle is a hell made of grenades, the AI is unable to recognize that it's safer not to join Vader's attack, and on top of all this the commander makes an extremely big deal about how you need Leia alive and lucid for her to be of any use - leading first-time players to believe there's some trick to beating her, only to realize after failing and having to do the entire mission over again that you just need to shoot her until she dies. That's not even getting into the fact that, if you play on Windows 7, Leia doesn't even spawn, so you can't beat the level. To top it all off, in an ironic reversal from the situation in the movie, your Imperial reinforcements are extremely limited while the Rebels are free to pull an endless Zerg Rush. Enjoy.
  • "Yavin 4 — Revenge of the Empire" is almost as bad. The Yavin 4 map isn't well liked anyway, with a comically easy to defend final point for Rebels/CIS and, like Naboo, a bloodbath zone in the centre where your allies go to die, but this mission adds infinite enemy respawns, rocket-spamming tanks, and requiring that you defend the aforementioned bloodbath zone for two minutes.

Hoth is the hardest mission in the campaign, but it's also the last one, so I think this disqualifies it from TOL status. Tantive IV and Yavin 4 aren't harder than part for the later part of the campagin.

• Geonosis. Ignore the command post on the hill? You die. Try to avoid the enemy vehicles? You die. Ignore the Geonosians, who fight for the CIS but don't count towards their reinforcements anyway? You die.

Another "this map is unbalanced".

• Death Metal. His level comes with the fastest song in the game. The first third of his fight features a shield that summons more enemies, and players with an AOE weapon like a Broadsword can get caught on it and quickly die to summoned enemies. The second third of the fight involves him teleporting away and summoning Demonic Spiders, which can quickly overwhelm anyone unlucky enough to have him keep reappearing at the far opposite corner of the room. This goes on until his last two hearts, at which point you have to start worrying about his horizontal fire blasts...
• King Conga is the only boss in the game who actively punishes you for failing to stick to the beat (every time you do he leaves his throne and attacks you), and comes with a beat that has a long pause that is easy to fall right into. The conga lines, both of whom must be killed before Konga can be harmed, can be annoying to whittle down and will easily trap and kill an unwary player if you don't have the right weapons for the job, especially when you take the mooks and Konga himself into account.
• Deep Blues becomes this for Eli and Monk, since the former cannot attack directly and the latter has to watch out for gold drops from each chess piece.
• There's also the Golden Lute at the end of Aria's run. Taking the aspects that already make Aria hard into account, you are practically required to beat this boss flawlessly. The boss' only weak point is its head and each time you attack the boss, it'll get confused which will make its movements more sporadic and unpredictable. There is a trick to attack it while it's confused for heavy damage which involves attacking the body dead center for the head to get into position, but it still requires careful timing to pull off. It'll also cast an area-wide confusion spell to temporarily reverse your controls and summon two dragons (both a Green and Red Dragon) to attack you. What's worse is that you also must be wary of the statues that shoot fireballs from atop the walls and the boss will sometimes make them go on a sequential shooting frenzy. Good luck with this one.
• Frankensteinway, one of Nocturna's final bosses. It has a huge health bar, and certain tiles are electrified to damage you. Once you deplete its health bar, it gains a new one in addition to a shield, which you must deactivate by pressing a switch, and spawns two coffins of increasingly high strength and a miniboss. It also has an area of effect slam attack, which gets replaced by a long-range dash in the later stages of the fight. With the mooks, minibosses, electrified floors, and area attacks, it can be highly confusing to find a way to dodge everything, deactivate the shield, and attack the boss.