Toughest and/or most aggrivating video game boss?

[NegaTsukasa]

In your history of gaming, what has had to be the most aggravating boss you've had to face and/or beat? ... if you beat him/her/it that is.


Mine: Baten Kaitos (GC) there is a save point in the game that is basically a "no exit until you beat the boss" save point in the room just before the boss. I screwed up and saved when I was like 15 levels under the safe point for fighting this guy called Jaicamo and his 2 other goons all at the same time. I lost so many times, tried every conceivable strategy, and got so close that I drop the game for like 3 months. spooky enough, the day I found a 4 leaf clover at my friends house was the day I beat them on the first go around. I cried tears of joy.

I takes a lot for a game to piss me off. this was and still has been the only boss to break my cool in my history of gaming.

[Noblewine]

Psycho Mantis in Battletoads and Double dragon for the SNES.

[Mantiskilla]

Mine: Baten Kaitos (GC)

Loved Baten Kaitos. Never ran into that problem of being under leveled b/c i did grind a bit in the game, but yeah he was still a pretty tough boss.

Psyvariar 2 boss Gluon (DC/PS2). Tough b/c it took me FOREVER to just get to boss on hard mode with one 1CC b/c not only did you have to do it on 1CC but then you had to have a certain amount of levels (points) to face him. Tough as nails as a final boss as well. PS2 version was even harder b/c the game had a better feel for buzzing skill with DC controller. Had to master the buzzing (grazing) technique to even have a chance.

Gluon I will forever despise you but loved the challenge and great music (I ended up using this Youtube video to get a clue on pattern memorization)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbaA1qIx-C4

[drizzle]

I guess that would be the final boss of Ecco the Dolphin. The thing would constantly 1-shot you and when it did you had to replay the entire final super-annoying level. I really enjoyed the game up until that point but then I just gave up.

[GCoffee]

Ornstein and Smough. :U

[Reksanden]

In your history of gaming, what has had to be the most aggravating boss you've had to face and/or beat? ... if you beat him/her/it that is.


Mine: Baten Kaitos (GC) there is a save point in the game that is basically a "no exit until you beat the boss" save point in the room just before the boss. I screwed up and saved when I was like 15 levels under the safe point for fighting this guy called Jaicamo and his 2 other goons all at the same time. I lost so many times, tried every conceivable strategy, and got so close that I drop the game for like 3 months. spooky enough, the day I found a 4 leaf clover at my friends house was the day I beat them on the first go around. I cried tears of joy.

I takes a lot for a game to piss me off. this was and still has been the only boss to break my cool in my history of gaming.

UGH, I HATED Giacomo. For me, though...... A certain FOE in the first Etrian Odyssey. To kill that bastard you had to finish all of the other FOEs in the area as well, and there were 15+.

[Kyrith_Ranger_Pso]

7th day shin megami tensei devil survivor final battle, you have to battle all the major bosses over again in a row without saving, at this point i gave up and decided to quit playing

[Yata The Prophet]

In your history of gaming, what has had to be the most aggravating boss you've had to face and/or beat? ... if you beat him/her/it that is.


Mine: Baten Kaitos (GC) there is a save point in the game that is basically a "no exit until you beat the boss" save point in the room just before the boss. I screwed up and saved when I was like 15 levels under the safe point for fighting this guy called Jaicamo and his 2 other goons all at the same time. I lost so many times, tried every conceivable strategy, and got so close that I drop the game for like 3 months. spooky enough, the day I found a 4 leaf clover at my friends house was the day I beat them on the first go around. I cried tears of joy.

I takes a lot for a game to piss me off. this was and still has been the only boss to break my cool in my history of gaming.
And this is the reason I always grind a bit in games. Better to finish a few less games in my lifetime than to make sure I don't get my ass handed to me too many times in any one game.

[FOkyasuta]

Oh heres two good ones.

Geese Howard & Omega Rugal. For the less skilled players, there cheap. But if your highly skilled its not cheap and more along the lines of a challenge for one reason. Projectile Spammer GTFO.

And lets not forget Akuma from the Original SFII Turbo.

[Randomness]

UGH, I HATED Giacomo. For me, though...... A certain FOE in the first Etrian Odyssey. To kill that bastard you had to finish all of the other FOEs in the area as well, and there were 15+.

I can't recall if that applied to re-fights with that boss, but yeah, that took me a few in-game days to clear the area out to fight it.


7th day shin megami tensei devil survivor final battle, you have to battle all the major bosses over again in a row without saving, at this point i gave up and decided to quit playing

You must not have been on the Haru ending. It gets even worse on that one. Though, I had my characters bonkers enough to cut through it. (The boss refights aren't bad if you've got a few stupid demons at hand)


Ornstein and Smough. :U

Dear lord. Thank you for summon signs. I got someone who wasted Smough in the first 15 seconds. (I was doing okay, my fireballs could off Smough if I could keep him in front of Ornstein long enough, but... then I had to deal with being two-shotted by unblockable spear attacks)


In your history of gaming, what has had to be the most aggravating boss you've had to face and/or beat? ... if you beat him/her/it that is.


Mine: Baten Kaitos (GC) there is a save point in the game that is basically a "no exit until you beat the boss" save point in the room just before the boss. I screwed up and saved when I was like 15 levels under the safe point for fighting this guy called Jaicamo and his 2 other goons all at the same time. I lost so many times, tried every conceivable strategy, and got so close that I drop the game for like 3 months. spooky enough, the day I found a 4 leaf clover at my friends house was the day I beat them on the first go around. I cried tears of joy.

I takes a lot for a game to piss me off. this was and still has been the only boss to break my cool in my history of gaming.

This. Not this particular fight, but the one where you fight all three of them TWICE. Back to back. And the second time you don't have access to spirit hax moves. I'd put this as my "most aggravating". When Giacomo decides he'll use both turns hammering the same person, that person is probably dead.

[Rashiid]

FFIII scared me when the entire last area had no save point, not even after boss fights (5 of them). Almost lost, but managed to win. If I lost, that would've been a good 2~3 hours down the drain.

Believe it or not, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. For some damn reason, I could not get past the boss fight against The Biolizard for awhile. I died about 60~70 times (walked in with 99 lives, beat him with about 20~30 left). It was the stupid part where you're floating and have to dodge the pink balls of death (the Shadow solo part, not the final fight). Always died somehow. I wanted to cry xD

[BIG OLAF]

Probably the last time you fight Jeanne in Bayonetta. She just kept wrecking me, no matter what I did. Eventually I got lucky and got her really low on health really quickly, but man.

[NoiseHERO]

I think the last hard boss I can remember was megaman 9's last boss...

MAAAAAAAN that boss took a lot of practice... juggling and dodging that evil bouncey ball with perfectly timed shots...

[Sayara]

Culex.
When your underleveled

[Kent]

Ornstein and Smough. :U
You're insane.

They're among the easiest boss battles in that entire game. Capra and Asylum Demon are much more difficult just because you're rushed down by the boss and his minions as soon as you enter the boss room or, in the case of the latter, you have to fall into the room so you take damage, and the boss has remote, AOE magic attacks that are unavoidable unless you're already sprinting away from their center where you'll have precisely enough time to dodge-roll out of their range if you do it right before the explosion happens.

Even Capra Demon is easy enough once you manage to last past the first few seconds, since you can so easily cheese him and his hounds (it's just the start of the fight that's really tricky). Contrast Asylum Demon where you can literally be one-shotted by the boss if its AI randomly decides to attack as soon as you enter, because it's designed in a way so as to make it not actually possible to avoid. It's not so much difficult as it is randomly pre-designated as being unwinnable and that is frustrating (and incredibly bad design).

Of course, Dark Souls is actually a disappointingly-easy game in the first place.

[NegaTsukasa]

This. Not this particular fight, but the one where you fight all three of them TWICE. Back to back. And the second time you don't have access to spirit hax moves. I'd put this as my "most aggravating". When Giacomo decides he'll use both turns hammering the same person, that person is probably dead.

Ugh! It's been so long. the fight I was mentioning was the one on the air ship in that industrial city. was that the double fight? anyway, I had no idea that I was not high enough to fight them. and I was stupid to save on that ship! learned my lesson once again about grinding more before fighting.
But no matter how you look at it that boss was an over all annoyance in my gaming history book.

[Alnet]

Ornstein and Smough. :U

O&S isn't so bad. I only died to them once by a freak butt-slamming accident against Super Smough. But it got me Ornstein's Armor, his Soul, and his Ring at the same time in my first playthrough when I decided to take down Super Ornstein instead. In any case, NG+ Four Kings pre-patch was the worst boss fight in that game. It took me three days of retries to beat that one fight.

Since I've mostly been playing Gundam Extreme Vs. lately, I'd love to quote Extreme Gundam (particularly Extreme Gundam Cp), but that's not really a tough fight, so much as it is just ridiculously cheap. The guy only uses three moves, despite having a wide repertoire. And only maybe one of them is blockable, and the other two moves, which he spams nonstop from incredibly steep angles that are hard to counter from, chain directly into one another and take off 60%+ HP if they do.

Legit hardest boss in recent memory is Emperor Tiberius (and his transformations) in Hard Corps Uprising.

[GCoffee]

You're insane. Textwall, derp!

Wut? Any weapon with bleeding attached made the second Asylum Demon a cakewalk, and it was easy enough as it was without one. His AoE attacks are easily avoided as long as you do not get too cocky and want to land yet another hit on the guy. That is why the fight usually lasts rather long (unless bleeding weapon, derp), but at the same time is ridiciously easy. You found the fall at the beginning of the fight frustrating? Just make sure you fall at the place farthest away from the demon and then sprint behind any pillar. Take one or two Estus Flusks and you are at full health again. What is the problem here?

The Capra Demon is a son of a woman with a certain profession, though, yup. If you said the game design kinda sucked in this fight, I would have to agree.

Still, S&O gave me the most trouble in the game, probably because I had neither magic nor pyromancy at that point. And pyromancy rapes as I only learned later.
Those two were the first bosses for which I had to rely on a summon sign since they simply made me go insane.

And well, I just started Demon's Souls recently, and it certainly is much tougher than Dark Souls in.... every aspect, really.


O&S isn't so bad. I only died to them once by a freak butt-slamming accident against Super Smough. But it got me Ornstein's Armor, his Soul, and his Ring at the same time in my first playthrough when I decided to take down Super Ornstein instead. In any case, NG+ Four Kings pre-patch was the worst boss fight in that game. It took me three days of retries to beat that one fight.

As I said, I might have found them utterly difficult due to my lack of spells, pyromancy or even bows. Meleeing them is just a pain in the arse.

I cannot say much about the Four Kings fight since I had some pretty good player assist me whenever I fought them so far, and they handled them pretty well. But that was yet another fight where I noticed how screwed pure melee builds are.

[Akaimizu]

Fighting games. That's easy. Most aggravating boss is easily Johann from the aptly titled "Rage of the Dragons". You won't understand the title until you face that boss. And considering that I've pretty much beaten every boss in every SNK-produced fighting game ever. This somewhat third-party company actually outdid them all. Johann has only 1 way to defeat him given that every cheese move he has, he can cancel at any frame he wants to into another move. There is a rather hard to execute exploit of a distance game (with a very small window) for which he actually allows you to do your attack without a guaranteed counter. But oh no. It's not one move from an exact distance. It's a specific pattern that literally takes hours to figure out.

Horrible boss. Even when you figure out to beat him, it's an unsatisfying method. It's not discovery of weaknesses in a boss pattern, or specific moves he or she has recovery from. Not Johann, it's some invisible pattern by which there's no actual tangible weakness you learned, but just something where you learn the boss just decides not to execute a counter there. And this is why it takes so long to figure it out. There's no logical feedback for which you could garner boss knowledge from. Just a (Hmm. I did this at this exact distance, and the boss decided not to counter even though he certainly could) Given that the boss isn't just going to sit back and let you figure this out, and his ability to murder you in 5 seconds, this was a major arduous process.

Outside of Fighting games?

Easy. Ninja Gaiden 1 on the NES, final boss. Oddly enough, it's not the Boss himself that makes him the worst. It's levels 6-2 and 6-3 that make him the worst. Why? Because levels 6-2 and 6-3 were made by the devil, and are also exercises of insane trial and error until you figured out a nigh perfect (hard to execute) pattern to get through them.

And........the real kicker.......you do all of that to get to him and if you lose, you not only don't get to jump right in and fight him again....you don't even get to start on the level for which he's an end boss for.... oh no. You start right back at level 6-1. Nope, you can't even earn a place-marker for getting past the hell which is 6-2 and 6-3. They make you have to endure it all over again, and without the ability to quickly learn the boss pattern by repetition. Nope, this ensures you get as little knowledge with the life you scrape by on, to make you do 6-2 and 6-3 over and over again to fight him, until you figure him out. Nowhere else in the game does it make you go that far back on a continue. They programmed that evilness in because the forces of the underworld told him so. (The same ones responsible for giving the 6-2 and 6-3 designer(s) their inspiration in hopes that people will sell souls to beat those levels)

If the plan was that anybody legitimately beating NG1 was to become a potential (best action video game player ever), they might be right. Then again, I think the truth came out that this was US only, that it was a last minute change, and that it wasn't properly play-tested for difficulty. Alas, the new Ninja Gaiden games don't compare to that experience. Probably why I do so well in them, actually love their challenge, and actually have them as my favorite 3D combat action adventure games of all time. (Currently. Can't be sure if NG3 will ruin it or not.)

[joefro]

Every single boss fight in Shadows of the Damned was aggravating. I wouldn't necessarily say they were tough, they were just boring and repetitive--which made me extremely aggravated.

[Kent]

Wut? Any weapon with bleeding attached made the second Asylum Demon a cakewalk, and it was easy enough as it was without one. His AoE attacks are easily avoided as long as you do not get too cocky and want to land yet another hit on the guy. That is why the fight usually lasts rather long (unless bleeding weapon, derp), but at the same time is ridiciously easy. You found the fall at the beginning of the fight frustrating? Just make sure you fall at the place farthest away from the demon and then sprint behind any pillar. Take one or two Estus Flusks and you are at full health again. What is the problem here?
If you read what I said instead of derping at it, the problem is that he can start launching an attack as soon as you enter the room, before you actually do have time to get out of the way or recover.

The fight itself is a marathon fight, and incredibly repetitive (you basically have to get his AI into a pattern where it can't hit you, which is neither fun nor a good design). Getting the fight started right is not only a trial and error process, but because of how its AI works, there's also a random chance that he'll instantly attack in a way that's not actually possible to avoid.

It's that part right there that's weak design - in a game so decisively skill-based such as Dark Souls, random occurrance (especially of such a scale) has no place in the design.


Still, S&O gave me the most trouble in the game, probably because I had neither magic nor pyromancy at that point. And pyromancy rapes as I only learned later.
The only spells I knew at the time were Lightning Spear and Great Lightning Spear. Neither of which are very powerful or usable in a fight like that.

Pyromancy is for chumps though. It's easymode for a game that isn't very difficult in the first place.


I cannot say much about the Four Kings fight since I had some pretty good player assist me whenever I fought them so far, and they handled them pretty well. But that was yet another fight where I noticed how screwed pure melee builds are.
Four Kings can get intense. The common strategy pre-patch was to load up in the heaviest armor possible (generally Havel's), cast Iron Flesh as you get close, and hope you beat them down faster than they do the same to you.

I haven't tried fighting them since then though - apparently Iron Flesh got nerfed into the ground or something.

[Randomness]

Pyromancy is for chumps though. It's easymode for a game that isn't very difficult in the first place.

Pyromancy has shit for range. Combustion is ridiculously good though. And I can't help but laugh maniacally inside when I charge into an enemy group while charging up a firestorm. There's the mob of spear enemies in the Painted World around the statue. I LOVE that spot for soul farming with firestorms. One shot is good for 90% of the group.

I mean, yes, pyromancy does RIDICULOUS damage, but it's not like I can just farm up some items to do it endlessly like in Demon's Souls.

O&S gave me a headache because after I'd toasted Smough I was about out of fireballs. That, and Ornstein kept flanking me. I had Smough down completely. Four attunement slots and yet I only could shoot about 20 fireballs (In retrospect, I was making awful use of said slots).

The cheapest thing about pyromancy is how it doesn't care about your stats. Because of that, ANYONE can use pyromancy to full effect, which is, admittedly, a little silly. But easymode? Hardly.


As to the Giacomo fight I mentioned, it's in a tiny hut in a place called the Celestial Alps. And is easily the hardest fight in the game.