Final boss battles you feel the series did right?

[Rez09]

Actually Neo-Exdeath was a pretty stellar final boss. Easy if you knew what your were doing, but a total dick if you didn't. The fact he's designed to screw over players who felt they could just use the broken Duel-Wield/Rapidfire/Flare trick for an easy one round victory was gold and something I feel more final bosses should do. Kind of reminds me of the Philemon boss battle in Persona 2:EP where he will counter the most game breaking Fusion Attack with his own version.

Oh? What did Exdeath do to counter that? I know he is multipart, so excess damage might be wasted, but I don't remember much else of note he really did, other than being deathly allergic to gill toss. <_______<

I generally prefer a little more challenge with my final bosses, which is why I've been pleasantly surprised by SaGa since it delivers on that promise. Granted, I feel the games could do a better job of preparing you for said challenge. The Egg and the Seven Heroes were awesome boss battles that really tested all my skills and made me appreciate the game mechanics better.

Sadly though, it is really inconsistent through the series, sometimes via intention and sometimes due to bugs/oversight. Saruin in RS1 has the potential to be an absolute monster of a boss and was intended to also be the game's super boss if you gave him the Obsidian Sword, but his poor AI and any form of water immunity render the fight completely negligible. The same is largely true of the final boss in RS3, as it was also designed as both the normal final boss and super boss, depending on player action, but they forgot to work with hp thresholds and most of the 'super' form of the boss fight can just be skipped. . _. That said, some of the Frontier bosses were well done and have solid gimmicks, like one swapping between physical and magical resistance or another gaining strength as you kill off its minions. But, yeah, on the whole I feel SaGa has done final bosses better.

Bhunivelze in Lightning Returns is a pretty good final boss. He's a test on if you learned how to block and stagger.

Oh, I just started that, actually. Like, today. Got me a pretty hot pink outfit ain't nobody with any self respect wearing; good to hear the final boss is going to put up a fight. Also probably bodes poorly for my game plan so far of 'run at things swinging and forget block exists'.

The final boss of Stormblood (SPOILER)Shinryu is fantastic. Especially at launch when everyone was 290 to 310. He was a test of how well you know the mechanics as he threw everything at you.

I didn't take the MMOs into consideration, but they seem like a good place to look at the balance between difficulty and frustration when it comes to final bosses. I assume this boss is at the end of a raid, so there is a dungeon and several bosses to fight before him without any checkpoints in the event of a partywipe, so I'm curious: how trial and error was he before your group managed to figure him out? And were you ever annoyed getting to that point of understanding and gear level? I know I was playing Tera with a friend and she got super pissed at the end of the game with some of the raid bosses and grinding and we never made it to the final raid bosses.

To me I don't care that much about final bosses being super hard. I'll accept a little more difficulty than throughout the game and I'd prefer it not to be total cake, but I don't want it to be frustrating either. If I die a few times, that's generally fine for me, depending on the length of the fight, but I don't need to die to be satisfied. As long as I feel like I can die, I'll probably be happy. A few near misses will be good enough. What constitutes a near miss may change depending on whether it's turn-based or ATB. The key thing is that it feels like a close call. As long as it gets the heart rate up, it's done its job.

So tension and emotional response over difficulty? I wonder if that's why most of the final bosses in the series have a Big Bang/Heartless Angel/Merciless Judgement/ect. attack, which usually hit you with that, 'oh, crap!' moment in a generally theatrical manner without actually wiping you. Hmmm. You know, thinking about it, that philosophy even dates as far back as the original Cloud of Darkness fight, as even though Flare Wave can, and definitely will, kill you, there's more feeling to the fight than actual difficulty -- as long as your heal charges hold out she isn't likely to kill you, but there is that tension of being pounded wave after wave and watching your post healing hp total whittle down, having to juggle your secondary healer between DPS and medic duty. I definitely think they got that feeling right there, much moreso than with many of the other bosses. Curious, how do you feel about the Chaos, Emperor, and Cloud fights?

That said, developer intention aside, I do have to say those kinds of attacks have left me a bit desensitized, with the archetype being so common. It's too bad they haven't done a bit more with it, like tying in a risk/reward mechanic, like perhaps the boss entering a healing phase or something afterwards until you deal x damage, so you have to balance your own healing against stopping its healing. Or maybe the boss lands an AoE poison attack before using it, so you need to cure that so you don't die after the attack lands. An additional layer of interactivity would certainly be nice.

How do you all feel about super bosses relative to final bosses?