Your top five most difficult boss battles in gaming.

[Wolf Kanno]

Pretty straightforward, who are the five hardest bosses you've ever tackled or even maybe rage quit over?

Before we get started, I want to clarify that this doesn't necessarily count super bosses. Those guys are designed to wreck you, and it would be boring to see this thread be filled up with just those types of bosses.

[Karifean]

Clownpiece from Touhou 15: Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom. When a Stage 5 boss on Normal is harder than that same game's final boss, Extra boss and most of the final and extra bosses of the rest of the series, you know something went wrong. This girl is complete and utter madness, both literally in-game and also as a game boss.

The Sleeping Table from Persona 3 FES, probably because I didn't have Mediarama. I literally could not have healed back all the damage it dealt if I dedicated all my turns to using healing spells, and two of its spells were enough to wipe out the entire party. I eventually had to resort to going all-out offensive and simply using the equivalent of Megalixirs to heal every time it used its powerful moves.

Chac from Final Fantasy X-2. You have a couple of ways you can abuse her AI to guarantee your win. And you damn well better use them because her damage output is far beyond your capabilities to endure, and a single mistake ends up with a character lost for all time. If you don't AI abuse you have to come up with very specific ways to deal with her every move. She's a superboss, but she's so far above and beyond anything in the game up to that point I felt the need to include her regardless.

I'll need to think about the other two for a bit longer.

[Spuuky]

The hardest bosses I've fought in a game have actually been in Final Fantasy Record Keeper. It's a little tricky as their difficulty is so dependent on the kind of team you've built up but a number of them have presented real challenges.

[Depression Moon]

Sturm - Advance Wars: It took me three times to get to the end of the game due to difficulty and when I finally did I ended up with the three worst possible characters: Andy, Grit, and Sami. You're already at a severe disadvantage when fighting Sturm, he starts out with way more troops, bases, and money than you and then you have the three worst characters to fight against him. Online guides even tell you that their strategy might not work, so good luck.
smurf this guy.

Ozma - Final Fantasy IX: It only took me three tries on my first playthrough, but every subsequent one, it's taken me a while and I think I've only ever beat him twice because part of it is luck. I think I got lucky on my first playthrough.

Aesir, God of Chaos: This is just a recent one. I played Bayonetta 2 recently and found the game's final boss to be tough.

Clay - Pokemon Blaze Black: Blaze Black is a Pokemon hack that adds more Pokemon to the game's and increases the difficulty and I think Clay was the hardest boss I fought. His pokemon have stronger attacks than you, he starts off with slipstream, his seismitoad busts out coverage moves, and that mothersmurfing Excadrill. That Excadrill! Swords Dance all day. I think I had to go and get me a Swanna and teach it Rain Dance in order to beat him.

Defender and Factory Chief - Super Mario RPG Revolution:

You really think I'm going to spend all this time trying to beat you?
https://youtu.be/aF8quLKkk38?list=PL...1voj-wtE&t=285

[KleinerKiller]

5. Empress Bulbax - Pikmin 2. Specifically, the second battle when she goes from a pushover who rolls from side to side to a destroyer of worlds who spawns dozens of babies in seconds. The babies are easily killed, but they're fast and are the only enemies in the game whose bites instantly kill Pikmin. No matter how many times I tried, no matter how many Pikmin I managed to keep alive to the end of her cave, those babies always cut my armies down. I don't believe I ever actually beat her.

4. Magnus von Grapple - Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Lots and lots of health, high defense, punishing attacks that are really hard to block, the works. What always made him extra frustrating for me, though, was that you have to fight him in the chapter before you start getting any of your high-damage partners or abilities; and the partner you get in that chapter and are encouraged to use, Flurrie, is arguably the most useless combat partner in the game. I had to hammer away at it and try different tactics for weeks before I could beat it the first time.

3. Shao Kahn - Mortal Kombat 9. Even for a fighting game final boss, he's absurd. Only a few of your available attacks have any chance of damaging him, and those only take a few pixels off his health bar -- all the rest glance off against his arbitrary super-shield. His attacks in turn can take off thirds or even half of your health, and many can't be properly blocked. And to top it off, you have to play as Raiden, a character I've always found sluggish and imbalanced and thus never bothered to master. Took me weeks.

2. Dark Bowser & Dark Fawful Core - Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. It's actually a really fun, well-designed, and rewarding final boss fight, but the absurdly high health of both enemies and their ability to restore almost all health at random progressively wore me down until I started giving up for long periods of time before coming back and flailing at it again. It took me almost a year and a half to actually beat it, and the successful battle took around two uninterrupted hours.

1. Vox Airships - Bioshock Infinite. I don't care that it's more of a long wave-based escort mission than a boss fight, because it's the closest thing the game has to a final boss and the single hardest fight in any game I've ever played. Wave after wave of the most punishing enemies and minibosses the game has to offer storm the arena to home in on a generator with pitifully little health, and you have to stop them from destroying it. Unfortunately, your options for defending points you're not at are limited to single-use and unreliable vigor traps, and the endgame ability to summon Songbird that's supposed to make you feel powerful takes forever to recharge, so you pretty much have to save it for the scripted "destroy the airships" and spend the rest of the time desperately bouncing around and trying to be in ten places at once. The fact that it's a gate blocking one of my favorite endings in gaming still feels like a personal offense.

[Pumpkin]

1. Arietta the Wild -Tales of the Abyss. Huge difficulty spike
2. Stupid dragon tree nonsense - Suikoden 4
3. MYU - Ar Tonelico Qoga. Just gave up and got the normal end, espesh since it wasn't my fave game to begin with
4. Qada - Bravely Default
5. Final boss Shallistera story - Atelier Shallie

[Depression Moon]

I forgot, I also never beat the secret boss in Ultimecia's castle or Omega Weapon in Final Fantasy V. I never really tried to beat Omega like that though. Just ran into it on accident a couple of times.

[Sephiroth]

I just need one.

O-hana no zero - Drag-on Dragoon 3/Drakengard 3 Final Boss

[Skyblade]

Margaret - Persona 3 Portable

I took this on as a personal challenge. Just my main character, versus Margaret. No party members. One of the toughest battles I've ever fought. But I won.

[Vermachtnis]

Kuzuhamon and Samudramon in Next Order. The difficulty leap for the final dungeon was insane enough, but then right before the final boss, these two try to stop you. They threw out strong attack one after another and spammed their limit breaks. Even after using the ExE, my back was still against the wall until Samudramon went down. But even Kuzuhamon by herself was no slouch.

Imperialdramon PM from Cyber Sleuth. Kinda iffy about putting this one here. He's the final royal knight, making him the super boss of his game and he's kind of a gimmick boss too, but he was a pain in the ass. It starts off normal enough. Then you get his health under 50% and starts doing a bahamut and charging for seven turns and he's still going all out and you can't hurt him so all you can do is survive. Did I mention the way this game handles difficulty is giving the bosses a lot of speed so they get several turns in a row. Luckily if you survive that onslaught the fight's over.

Ouroboros from Strange Journey. ALL OF MY HATE. MA too, but Ouroboros left a stronger impression.

[Lyndis Highwind]

In no particular order:

Batos from Mega Man X Command Mission. It probably wouldn't be as hard now, but when I was little it was sooooo hard. It made me take a break from the game for awhile.

Ultimecia from VIII. Again, this boss took me forever to beat. A lot of people seem to say that she's really easy, but she wasn't easy for me.

The Yellow Devil from Mega Man 1. I'm still stuck on this one.

The vegetable boss from XII. It made me rage quit and I didn't play that game for a looooong time after that.

And "Disciple 1" from Xenoblade Chronicles.

[Steve]

Can I name just 1 that counts as all 5 for me and probably for Psy too!?

1 through 5 is:

Lambent Berserker, 2 player co-op Insanity difficulty. Gears of War 3. If it so much as touches the air of your dive to the side, you die. If it manages to sniff you, you die, if it manages to piss fire blood all over the map and you touch that, you die. If one person dies, it's game over, if the AI companions die, it's game over... I recall we sat there for several gaming sessions just trying to figure it out. Legitimately, I think even the final battle of the game was easier than that. To this date, myself and Psy have never gone back to do another attempt. I think it literally ruined us. Never has the lyrics of In The End from Linkin Park been more apt. It didn't matter how perfect your reload was, no matter how little health that bastard had left, if the AI screwed itself (which it would regularly), it didn't even matter!

[Wolf Kanno]

The Four Kings (Dark Souls)
Four_kings01.jpg
Talk about a DPS test. The Four Kings are a required boss in DS1 and when the fight starts, you only have to deal with one of them, but after the first minute, a second one appears and then every minute after another appears. You can "kill" each of the kings, but if they still have health left before the time limit requirement, it's possible to fight five or six of them. They hit hard, have way better reach than they should, homing magic, a very powerful AoE ability for hip huggers, like to gang up on you, and have more health than some of the games optional challenge bosses. The only reason I was able to even beat these guys was because I lucked out and was able to summon a player with a very powerful sorcery build. Yet in every attempt to help another player beat them, I got trounced on pretty quickly. Did I mention that summoning help raises their health, effectively making this fight even harder since it raises the odds of always having four of them on the field at a time? There are certainly more challenging bosses in DS, but this one is required.

Redrum (Xenogears)

Ah yes, the infamous Redrum. Xenogears vets will often tell you that he's the true final boss and everything after him is a cakewalk, and frankly that's not necessarily false. He's fast, loves to inflict confusion on party members to waste their turn, counters a lot, hits hard and has a special move that kills a party member and restores his own health with the character's drained health. That last move always works, can be used consecutively by the boss, and it doesn't matter if the boss hasn't been hit yet. Did I mention that two of the required party members for this fight have the highest HP in the game? He also has way more health than anything you've dealt with before. To make matters worse, he's the boss of the Kislev Sewers, yes a sewer dungeon, and one most players despise because it is incredibly easy to get lost in it. You're only safe bet to win, is to avoid using single Deathblows and charge up a 28 point Deathblow Chain Combo with all three party members and try to take him down in a single round. This may be an issue as well since Rico is a relatively new party member and will likely not have many strong deathblows by this point unless you grind in the dungeon. Even worse, he's the slowest party member as well, so getting him ready for this strategy may involve giving the boss extra rounds to out right murder a party member. Fun fact, halfway through the game, you can get into a battle where you have to fight two of them at once.

Kaiser Sigma (Mega Man X3)
651px-KaiserSigma-MMX3.jpg

He is still the only Sigma I've never beater, but I may have to remedy that once Bloodborne and Persona 5 are finished with. He is certainly the hardest incarnation that doesn't have to rely on cheap one-hit-kills like some of his later incarnations. What makes this fight difficult is that Sigma's only weakness is his head, which is the smallest part of his body. He also takes very little damage when hit unless you have a certain upgrade that is itself a Guide Dang It and locks you into a slightly different ending. Part of the challenge is that this guy will turn the screen into a bullet hell nightmare with his various attacks, so trying to find an opening can be very challenging. The other issue, is that while the X-Buster upgrade seems ideal for this battle, it's probably one of the worst upgrades for the weapon in the series and simply makes timing the hits more difficult than necessary. I have simply not had the time or patience to deal with this boss properly, but he has given me far more grief than any other incarnation of the boss, including the awful X7 version.

Ouroboros (Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey)


Echoing Vermachtnis, meet Strange Journey's first (of many) Luck Based boss battle. The first form is manageable as the boss simply regenerates every round and uses Zio type spells than can easily be counters. Once that's part is done, the real battle begins. This boss has two really nasty attacks, Wave of Death, which is an absurdly powerful physical group hit that can do around 300+ of damage (max health in this game is 999 btw) and Disaster Cycle, a move that does moderate physical damage and has a high chance of inflicting one of the game various status effects on your whole party. Did someone get hit with Bomb status, well then they have to defend every round cause if they take a hit, they are instantly killed and the whole team takes damage equivalent to the amount of health the victim had at the time. Did you get hit with Stone? The character is counted as dead. Did I mention this was one of the SMT games that utilizes the whole "main character dies = Game over"? Even worse, there is no way to really protect your MC from any of these status effects either. So yeah, luck based mission.

The Dark One (Arc the Lad 2)
0.jpg

smurf this guy. No seriously, this guy is the coup de grace of a blemish that seriously tarnishes what was ultimately an excellent SRPG title up until this point. This guy is the final boss, and he will make getting to the game's final ending a serious headache for you. He only has powerful elemental AoE moves, high evasions for a stationary boss, the highest HP of anything in the game at 9999hp (the previous boss had something like 4000HP to just put this in perspective), and ridiculous defense. To make matters worse, despite being a dude in a giant orb, he only takes damage from attacks directly in front of him and only one tile worth, meaning only one short range fight can hit him and everyone else will have to use magic (which he barely takes any damage from) or longer ranged weapons like guns and spears which often do pitiful damage. This fight pretty much took me an hour to win and the only saving grace I had was a simple A.I. exploit. He is programmed to always make Arc his primary target if he is on the playable team, so I simply had Arc move to the back of the map and try his best to survive the onslaught of enemy spells while the rest of the team moved forward and did as much damage as they could. Even with my best damage dealers, we were doing barely three digits worth of damage when they actually hit and I had to pretty much bring in two different healers to keep Arc alive long enough get the deed done, and I'm still pretty sure he eventually got killed because I blew through most of my MP for this fight. Part of me feels that I may have simply just missed some easy exploit that makes this fight trivial, but a quick look around the net shows that this may not likely be the case.