Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm trying to come up with a list of bad videogame bosses and villains. (Our website needs something fast and hackneyed to tie us over the Easter weekend, see.)

'Bad' can mean a bunch of stuff. Bosses that are too easy to beat, bosses that use horrible cheat-attacks, bosses that are lame and unmenacing - they're all fair game. So does anyone have any suggestions?

To get the ball rolling, I'll nominate Dobkeratops from R-Type (firing your Force weapon into his belly killed him in five seconds) and the head-honcho from Gears of War (barely distinguishable from all the other Locusts and dies unspectacularly on a train).

STREET FIGHTER 4! Cheating cunt.

FF9-End battle was a piece of piss
FFX-The end battle was a pile of shite and mega easy, the aeons before-hand were harder!
FFX2-End battle easy

I'd rather have the boss fights being easy because i don't like them. Super Mario Galaxy boss fights are dead easy but i don't mind them.

I nominate the boss of the 3rd level of No More Heroes as being the worse. It's just too hard and unfair, and prevented me of enjoying the rest of this lovely game (was lovely until this point).

Viewtiful Joe has also many hateful boss fights. Devil May Cry 4 also, mostly because they're really tiring.

I don't mind bosses on schmups actually, specially on Cave games which have many fun boss fights.

Jinpachi motherfucking Mishima, Tekken 5.

I hate easy end bosses, it's meant to be HARD, hence it being the end boss. In FFX-2 (shamelessly owned) the machina in the desert (side mission) was well hard in comparison to the end battle, that pissed me off

but Final Fantasy is just stat based and shouldn't be judged against other kinds of games. Final Fantasy bosses being hard or not is just a matter of how much did you grinded until that part.

Fair enough

Seth is so cheap that even on very easy he can still kill you with you barely touching him

It's actually more how well you customise your equipment for that boss and the sequence of actions you take.

FF has always had characters in who are harder than the final boss - Underwater Weapon in FF7 for instance.

Dolce in Eternal Sonata. The first time you encounter her, you've not used your current party members in ages and so they're not that levelled. She has attacks that do stupid damage WHEN BLOCKED and will kill most characters from full health with a single hit. She also is fast and can run around you and then attack with you unable to block.

To make matters worse, she's accompanied by two high-level versions of the pirate enemies. These guys are dangerous on their own as they also hit pretty damn hard, can resurrect each other, and make an already tough battle downright impossible.

The penultimate boss in Metroid Prime. Really enjoyed the game up to that point then it just really really fucked me off.

That bitch at the end of DOA4 - just as cheaty as Seth.

John Romero.

Meta-Ridley? He's small beer compared to Metroid Prime itself*, surely?

My least favourite boss, off the top of my head, is probably Viral, the boss of the Cell stage in Gradius IV. That probably doesn't mean anything to most people, but as I absolutely have to see any shmup I'm into through to the end on a single credit, I was subjected to literally weeks of misery by this fella. And then I found a video of a really easy-to-reach safe spot you can exploit. Gnnnnh!

*Which is still a fantastic battle.

there was one boss in metroid prime which really put me off the game. It was ghost-like, i don't remember if it was the penultimate or not. Bosses in MP3 are much more tolerable than either 1 or 2.

Well exactly.

He was really fucking me off then I saw on a forum / newsgroup that Prime was even more soapy chili covered fingers in your eyes painful that the one that preceded it so I thought "Fuck that" and never went back to it.

I can breeze through easy mode until I get to Seth, who I am yet to beat. Spoils the game somewhat.

Chun-Li's KICKKICKKICKKICKKICKKICKKICK move seems to upset him.

Ninja Gaiden had some toughnuts (Not that they stopped me )

Are Dead Risings Jeepkunts classed as a boss? If so they're the worst things ever. Ever.

Didn't it just. I don't think I ever managed to get past the Electro Worm thingy*, and then couldn't be arsed going through it all again because I'd played it on a friend's Xbox and didn't have the save file.

*I don't know how far from the end that was. I suspect quite far.

Not sure where the Electro Worm figured into it.

Did you reach the Gunship and Tank? They were lovely.

The tank certainly rings a bell. The gunship not so much, unless you mean helicopter.

Yes

FF8's battle with Edea, is probably the most unfair of the lot. She captures Rinoa and any spells that harm her also harm Rinoa and if Rinoa dies its game over. She also does mega damage to you and periodically drains Rinoa's HP where you can only do minimal damage to you.

FFX. Shadow Aeon battles and the plains stable where you can battle overlevelled versions of regular monsters are the hardest fights you'll ever have in FFX.

I've just skimmed through a boss guide. I was on chapter 10 of 16. Miles away! And really fucking hard.

Ah, there's a stage in Spiderman 3 where you have to climb and jump about in a stadium avoiding the villain's deathrays (or some such malarkey), it comes in pretty early in the game and COMPLETELY RUINS THE FUCKING GAME. To the point that I gave the game to my nephews in disgust

/EDIT: It was Spiderman 2

Beating Ninja Gaiden is one of my all time gaming highlights. The last few levels are hideous, but mind blowingly I nailed the final boss on the second attempt.

One of the things I like most about the FF games is the fact that they offers you mentally hard boss fights if you want them, but make them entirely optional.

- Any boss from any Sonic game ever. Rubbish.
- The end of Batman the movie - just hit him once. The end.

On that basis can we add the final monster in GOW2?

Bioshock.

God yeah, what a piss ant.

Oh Oh!

Fable 2's non-boss-fight boss-fight.

No. no we can't.

The TV show? That's funny, and fairly easy. Spidey 2 was one of my favourite GC games.

Well I couldn't and despised it!

Oh and we'll chuck in Dracula the boss at the end of Horror Island in Rainbow Islands...incredibly easy if you're supercharged and completely impossible if you are not.

The "bosses" in Bangai-O (Dreamcast) are pitiful.

You just stand there and shoot at them until they're dead. They're basically pointless.

That's fine by me though. I don't like boss battles much in general.
They're usually a case of trial-and-error first, and skillful playing second (especially with modern games).
Not something I enjoy in a video-game.

With games that I like, the easier the boss-battle the better (in most cases anyway - action/adventure games certainly), so I can get on with having fun playing through and exploring the next level/stage.

I'd like to add one from Ninja Gaiden. The first one (Murai, I think). Now he is incredibly easy once you know what you are doing. Unfortunately, you inevitably don't know what you are doing by the time you first meet him. The experience is like going through a meatgrinder.

Uncharted - PS3. Horrid insta-kill trial and error gunfight followed by horrid insta-kill "press x to not die" shit crime events. The worst part by a long shot of an otherwise fine game.

Metal Gear Solid 4 - PS3. Deeply dissatisfying, poorly-controlled fight with lame moves followed by a series of insults where all but one button is disabled, and all you can do is press that button, then watch a cut scene, then press that button, then watch a cut scene, then press that button, then watch a cut scene, and then watch a 70 minute cut scene. Utterly fucking miserable excuse for a boss.

Why are you casting damaging magic in FF8?

Death Adder (the last boss) in Golden Axe (the original). Bastard cheating cunthole who tends to knock you to the floor a lot and then immediately follow it up - 97% of the time - with a max level Dragon magic attack which takes away a bunch of your health in an instant. He has unlimited magic. He is always accompanied by a duo of equally bastard-like skeleton guards who you can beat up as many times as you like and yet never fucking die. Close combat seems to achieve nothing in the way of progress, so you end up spending eons (and credits) keeping a safe distance from them so you can do the running kick - the only effective move in the whole game, it appears. And that's without taking to account the flame floor attack he can also pull off on you at inopportune moments.

It's just the massive rancid cherry on top of an insanely overhyped and overlauded hack'n'slash where pretty much every enemy can kick your arse and floor you without you being able to break their combo and counter attack. Why Sega keep re-releasing it on every platform imaginable I don't know. Maybe it's aimed more at the supposedly "elite" types who scoff down upon those who don't know how to play such games "properly". Or something.

I've still not fully played GAs 2 and 3 to date so I don't know if they're easier or just as hateful.

Oh, thought of another candidate - the Stage 5 boss on Space Invaders Extreme 2.

Not so bad on Stage 5-A. But on Stage 5-D the initial attack alone (an instant myriad of rebounding lasers, bombs and tons of little yellow bullets) is almost impossible to avoid dying in and makes one wonder how the hell you're supposed to one-life this particular route at all (and it's already difficult enough to get through the previous stages without carking it), be it on Normal or Extreme. So not really impossible to beat in general, but it obviously hinders you from achieving the "No Miss" bonus at the end one way or another.

The armadillo boss from Ninja Gaiden 2 is definitely going in there. In addition to being a tough bastard, he self-destructs and kills you after you beat him. Nobody in the world would think to instinctively hit the block button after killing an enemy. Such a horribly cheap trick.

Naturally, I can't find a pic of this boss anywhere.

really hated that guy



don't be so crap. Golden Axe was incredible easy (in the Amiga at least)

Agreed!

Took me ages to do that one. You had to cast bloody Shell and Regen on Shadow (Rinoa) and all sorts to try and lessen the MP drain that Ultimecia* did. Then you could get Carbuncle to do Reflect on your party. Then the bitch would turn around and cast reflect on herself and then cast on herself, and you'd be in shit. Meteor and Quake were fuckers to cope with. I used to sit there screaming at the tv (worse than Frogger) and my mum banned me from the PS for a bit

*It wasn't Edea was it? It was Ultimecia I am sure of it. She like attached her to her chest *fnarr* and then used her as a human shield didn't she (will have to play it all again!)


EDIT: It was ADEL! That was it!!


Sorry, it's been driving me mad all day

I haven't played the Amiga version, obviously. Do try the arcade original or the Mega Drive version and see what I mean.

Running kick? the most effective move was to double-tap a direction to start running, then jump, then push down and attack to stab folk in the head.

Those Dark Aeon fights in FFX were a frikkin' joke. All their hits do max damage every time, and they get two shots per your three (at least the two I fought did). I breezed through the entire game, but even with grinding up until my characters were basically indestructible they killed me whilst barely batting an eyelid.

Yes, they were an addition to the European version. I just ended up using the instant kill for money thing one of the aeons could do.

I managed about half of the Dark Aeons. Nowhere near as bad as Ruby Weapon.