When 90% of them are fantastic, the other 10% just tend to stand out a lot more.
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What is the most badly designed boss you've beaten in a video game? (Including secret/super bosses)
- Thread starter Ultraviolence
- Start date
When 90% of them are fantastic, the other 10% just tend to stand out a lot more.
There was this PS1 game I've forgotten the name of. You played the result of experiments. You could do psychic stuff. Came on 3 discs. Was a bit resident evily. At the end of disc1 there was this ridiculous boss fight where you had to run around the boss like 50 times. It was totally stupid.
Nah, it's not particularly cool to push the player to that extent in the first hour of play. I'm all about a boss like that existing, but throw it in as a halfway point or a little more.
I'm not a huge fan of boss difficulties being rollercoaster'd throughout the game. Games should get progressively more difficult.
Also, you're right, it's not badly designed in it's patterns. Whats bad is that it's a bullet sponge. It takes forever to put down.
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Too many to easily find the the worst but just as an example the final boss in Torchlight was just awful. Just a huge damage sponge and spike in difficulty compared to the rest of the game. I never finished it.
Btw, as difficult as Orphan of Kos is in Bloodborne, ultimately it's ok for me because
A) he's optional
and B) it's consistent with the overall difficulty progression in the game and the DLC in particular.
Btw, as difficult as Orphan of Kos is in Bloodborne, ultimately it's ok for me because
A) he's optional
and B) it's consistent with the overall difficulty progression in the game and the DLC in particular.
The usual suspects from the Soulsborne games have already been listed, so I guess I can dig a little deeper.
Wiegraf in Final Fantasy Tactics is a pretty straight-forward example of bad game design. Not only is he stupidly hard in a game where planning and hard-numbers trump actual tactical decisions during battle, the game also has a really unfortunately placed save point before him. If you aren't staggering your saves, you can be locked in a situation where you are not given the opportunity to change your set-up. This effectively locks your save file in an unwinnable state. If you were lucky enough to have staggered saves, you still might have to resort to game-balance-breaking exploit-tactics that will trivialise the remainder of the game.
Wiegraf in Final Fantasy Tactics is a pretty straight-forward example of bad game design. Not only is he stupidly hard in a game where planning and hard-numbers trump actual tactical decisions during battle, the game also has a really unfortunately placed save point before him. If you aren't staggering your saves, you can be locked in a situation where you are not given the opportunity to change your set-up. This effectively locks your save file in an unwinnable state. If you were lucky enough to have staggered saves, you still might have to resort to game-balance-breaking exploit-tactics that will trivialise the remainder of the game.
In the game's defense; that battle is the fourth of a series of dungeon crawls/boss fights where all bosses use one or two status ailments and you can learn which ones to expect because you find accessories that prevent those particular ailments in the dungeon leading up to the boss. By the time you face the Angel, you're supposed to be savvy enough to get a clue when the chests leading to that boss contain anti-deathblow and anti-petrification gear. Not to mention the fact the boss was already seen earlier on carrying a huge-ass scythe, which in practically any RPG just screams "instant death". Not to say Trails SC doesn't have moments of spite towards blind players, but this one wasn't too bad if you were paying attention.
How'd we get to page 3 before The Imprisoned got mentioned?
- First off, it's a timed boss fight. You have a fair bit of time, but it's still uneeded stress that you don't need for it.
- The arena is giant and your Stamina bar isn't big enough to handle it. So it's a constant game of running about after the Imprisoned balancing the green stamina bar (Please drop that Stamina Bar Zelda, it's the worst).
- You have two options to fight in. Either run up above the Imprisoned and drop onto it's head, pray you don't fall off with the uneven geometry of the head and bash the stone into it's head. Repeat three times. This is the running option and the moment you fall off you get frustrated and have to do more running.
- The other option is to stub those white toes of his so he falls over. On yeah, when he steps, he makes a shockwave that deals damage and knocks you back.
- After hitting him once, he'll start sliding on the ground up the hill, being fully invincible at the time. You can't do anything at this point as you just watch your time to beat this phase drop.
- Oh, and guess what, you need to beat this guy 3 TIMES over the whole game.
- As an added bonus, he is terrible to fight in Hyrule Warriors as well.
He's also one of the worst looking bosses in the Zelda Series as well.
Thank you. Also surprised it wasn't on the first page.
Worst Zelda boss ever
Oh god. That was too big for me to see.
How'd we get to page 3 before The Imprisoned got mentioned?
- First off, it's a timed boss fight. You have a fair bit of time, but it's still uneeded stress that you don't need for it.
- The arena is giant and your Stamina bar isn't big enough to handle it. So it's a constant game of running about after the Imprisoned balancing the green stamina bar (Please drop that Stamina Bar Zelda, it's the worst).
- You have two options to fight in. Either run up above the Imprisoned and drop onto it's head, pray you don't fall off with the uneven geometry of the head and bash the stone into it's head. Repeat three times. This is the running option and the moment you fall off you get frustrated and have to do more running.
- The other option is to stub those white toes of his so he falls over. On yeah, when he steps, he makes a shockwave that deals damage and knocks you back.
- After hitting him once, he'll start sliding on the ground up the hill, being fully invincible at the time. You can't do anything at this point as you just watch your time to beat this phase drop.
- Oh, and guess what, you need to beat this guy 3 TIMES over the whole game.
- As an added bonus, he is terrible to fight in Hyrule Warriors as well.
He's also one of the worst looking bosses in the Zelda Series as well.
Yeah, that's the one.
He makes for incredible fight in the chalice dungeons though.
First phase of the final boss in Willow (NES). There is only one attack that works and it requires using magic. At level 13 (max is 16), you get enough MP to defeat her provided you don't miss even one of your attacks, so you have to start the battle with full MP. There are no items that replenish your MP. At level 14 you are allowed to miss once. Her attacks block your spells, so you have to be very accurate. If you waste too many shots, you need to reload the game and beat the whole final dungeon again unless you went back and saved after defeating the penultimate boss.
Yeah there's like, no actual way to beat him. You have to "cheese" him by abusing animations. It's stupid.
Bed of Chaos thread? Nope, Royal Rat Authority thread.
This fight is plagued with a boss with broken hitboxes, it hits you pretty hard, a horrid design, and mobs that are there only to annoy you, on top of that it can get you toxic which eats your health like crazy. I love Dark Souls 2 and defend it a lot, but there is no defense for this boss fight. It's shit, plain and simple.
Oh God, I hate this boss so much!
I was stuck at it for quite a while...
Most of the time I got toxic right away, and whenever I managed to kill the small rats without contracting it, the bastard just stomped me in seconds.
There's a lot of bosses across the series, there's bound to be some duds. I'd argue the most are solid if unspectacular, with true greats coming it at 3-4 per game.
Whoa, i was about to post this one cause nobody else seems to have ever mentioned this or agreed in my entire life before now but the torchlight boss is B R O K E N and it made me even more sour on the game than i already was.
So like here's whats up with this boss: he summons a mob of half a dozen dragons, the hardest regular enemies in the game, making him even harder to target and meaning you have to constantly keep racing around to avoid getting swarmed. And then to manage the arena he uses an ability that periodically reabsorbs those summons back to replenish his HP. Unfortunately, I discovered a pretty obnoxious bug: THE ONES OFFSCREEN DON'T DESPAWN. Meaning you eventually get a buildup of like 60 dragon enemies as soon as you're forced to the other side of the arena and naturally your performance takes a hit so now you're playing the boss in 10FPS as well.
Fortunately(?), the game is also designed to be GGEZ casual so I beat the boss by just leaving the arena and waiting for my health to regen and coming back. I think he wouldn't regain all his HP back unless you died? So in the end it's not the absolute hardest boss I ever did but it took a lot of patience and really didn't seem worth it.
Another boss I'd like to nominate is DEATH BRINGER from Golden Axe. Weirdly similar theme actually, he summons skeletons to meatshield him and they don't die (or he re-summons them immediately? i forget) and whenever he gets a hit on you EVERY TIME he gets another free hit on you with his infinite magic, just because. So the best strategy was just to do the running fly kick to the left to knock down a skeleton, running fly kick to the right to knock down a skeleton, running fly kick to the left to hit death bringer, running fly kick to the right to knock down the skeleton that got back up.... repeat for a solid 25 mins or so cause he has a lot of hp.
Also all of the bosses from actraiser and secret of mana are bad, every single one, thanks.
Also glad this topics just filled up with bed of chaos, a fair assessment.
Imprisoned is an unfair assessment though, i'm sorry but he is great and I would fight him 10 times in fact I probably have if you count hyrule warriors.
Bed of Chaos is a perfect example of a terribly designed boss.
The concept of the battle is sound enough, work your way around the boss to hit two weakpoints on either side, simple enough. But when you destroy that first weakpoint the whole battle starts to fall apart. Chunks of the floor collapsing as you're walking over it, and a sweeping attack that can knock you into the aforementioned newly formed death pits that has next to no cooldown just makes matters worse. Then you have two different types of projectile attack that can hit you fairly easily since you're focusing on avoiding the pitfalls and the bullshit sweeping attack. Then after all of that you have the final approach. If you're fortunate enough to have overcome all that bullshit twice over then there's a good chance you're going to die here! You have to run towards the boss to get the rest of the arena floor to collapse and then make a leap down onto awkwardly positioned roots below so you can hack your way through the Bed's innards to reach the heart of the boss and end the fight. The problem? Those sweeping attacks, the speed and frequency at which they slide across the floor is ridiculous and the hitbox on her hands is massive making it a complete crapshoot at times to time your approach and jump to the roots below correctly. Overall it feels like a boss where luck plays a huge part in your success, rather than skill. Something which a boss fight should never be. In fact, From Software realised this and had the game save your progress at multiple points throughout the fight so that if you did die, you wouldn't have to do each part again.
Absolutely awful.
The concept of the battle is sound enough, work your way around the boss to hit two weakpoints on either side, simple enough. But when you destroy that first weakpoint the whole battle starts to fall apart. Chunks of the floor collapsing as you're walking over it, and a sweeping attack that can knock you into the aforementioned newly formed death pits that has next to no cooldown just makes matters worse. Then you have two different types of projectile attack that can hit you fairly easily since you're focusing on avoiding the pitfalls and the bullshit sweeping attack. Then after all of that you have the final approach. If you're fortunate enough to have overcome all that bullshit twice over then there's a good chance you're going to die here! You have to run towards the boss to get the rest of the arena floor to collapse and then make a leap down onto awkwardly positioned roots below so you can hack your way through the Bed's innards to reach the heart of the boss and end the fight. The problem? Those sweeping attacks, the speed and frequency at which they slide across the floor is ridiculous and the hitbox on her hands is massive making it a complete crapshoot at times to time your approach and jump to the roots below correctly. Overall it feels like a boss where luck plays a huge part in your success, rather than skill. Something which a boss fight should never be. In fact, From Software realised this and had the game save your progress at multiple points throughout the fight so that if you did die, you wouldn't have to do each part again.
Absolutely awful.
Well if you've never played one, know that each entry has like 20-25 bosses on avg...so of course some of them are going to be lame.
Jo Amon as Majima in Yakuza 0 could not be beat by conventional means, not unlike So Amon with Kiryu who was actually a very fun fight!
I liked it, but I don't think it's anything more than "ok". The story is far more interesting than the gameplay. But compared to the other Remedy game I played (Alan Wake) I liked waaaaaay more, which I think is an unpopular opinion.
Plesioth in all of its appearances before Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. The early Monster Hunter games had hit detection issues with monsters' attacks hitting a bigger area than their models indicated, and Plesioth exacerbated it by standing way taller than the game was designed to handle, so it would routinely hit you while not making contact with any part of its body. Highlights include slapping you with the space below its tail and hip checking you while you were standing on the opposite side of it. Beyond that its moveset was really boring and it would occasionally spend time in the water where you could, if you were using a gun, shoot it and risk losing all the carves if you killed it in there, or, if you were using a blade, do absolutely nothing.
It was way better when it came back in 3 Ultimate where the hitboxes had been fixed up and you could chase it into the water.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow has a boss in its last DLC called The Forgotten One that's absolute trash.
Technically he's a "superboss" in the sense he's not in the main game, but what makes him shit is that all of his moves are unblockable. In a game that teaches you the best method in combat is to punish moves. By blocking.
Technically he's a "superboss" in the sense he's not in the main game, but what makes him shit is that all of his moves are unblockable. In a game that teaches you the best method in combat is to punish moves. By blocking.
Mewtwo in Pokémon XY
Broken because all the wrong reasons. One of the most powerful Pokémon ever, Lv.70, too. Approach with care? Naaaah, dude only knows psychic attacks, so you can take out a Lv.30 Carvanha and bite the shit out of him.
Yeah, that's how i catched it.
It was stupid.
Broken because all the wrong reasons. One of the most powerful Pokémon ever, Lv.70, too. Approach with care? Naaaah, dude only knows psychic attacks, so you can take out a Lv.30 Carvanha and bite the shit out of him.
Yeah, that's how i catched it.
It was stupid.
He can go to hell. I never get frustrated with games, but that asshole started to wind me up.
He's really easy, it's just your build that determines the artificial difficulty.
The final boss of Ys I is the reason I'm never replaying this game
This thread is a reminder of terrible game's I've put out of mind.
The entirety of Ys is bad. Really bad. Most of the bosses are terrible. But this one does take the cake, doesn't it.
I've played some badly designed boss fights in my time, but Drakengard 3's secret true ending boss was so poorly designed as to be a perfect combination of awful to actually play, a huge time sink, completely unfair, and infuriatingly difficult at the same time.
Any "boss" that requires me to constantly pause and resume a Youtube video so I can try and auditorily confirm that it's synced up with my TV so I can have a visual reference for an extremely poorly done Rhythm game with hidden notes right at the end that the game doesn't warn you about AT ALL which kill you instantly and make you restart the entire 8 minute sequence over again... yeah fuck that, the worst part is the completionist in me didn't let me stop until I beat it.
Any "boss" that requires me to constantly pause and resume a Youtube video so I can try and auditorily confirm that it's synced up with my TV so I can have a visual reference for an extremely poorly done Rhythm game with hidden notes right at the end that the game doesn't warn you about AT ALL which kill you instantly and make you restart the entire 8 minute sequence over again... yeah fuck that, the worst part is the completionist in me didn't let me stop until I beat it.
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Nah, Ys is great. Just two pretty dang hard boss fights (especially on Nightmare difficulty).
That one NieR automata boss in the desert at the beginning of Route C
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What the fuck was this shit. Only time I put on easy mode/auto battle or whatever
Wow this is where I stopped playing the game
Dagoth Ur in Morrowind.
Its the exact same combat as the rest of the game, just with more exciting music and a cool lava room. They attempted to mix it up by having you attack a stationary target in the room as opposed to a stationary opponent. Yup. At least with how OP you get in Morrowind it was over fast.
Its the exact same combat as the rest of the game, just with more exciting music and a cool lava room. They attempted to mix it up by having you attack a stationary target in the room as opposed to a stationary opponent. Yup. At least with how OP you get in Morrowind it was over fast.
Just this and the grim reaper (?) fight were bad really, but they were obnoxiously bad.
If you ever played Taiko no Tatsujin this video makes it extremely easy. It's basically just a Taiko song on easy.
I'll take it over all the other boss battles in this game with awful controls, horrible FPS and broken camera.
Maybe it was television lag at the time, but even with the video I still managed to somehow fail over and over for hours on end at the repeating notes parts.
When I saw the thread title, I thought of KH Birth by Sleep. I never bothered beating those super bosses. It was just not any fun. The secret super bosses of KH2: FM I had fun with, by everything about the Birth By Sleep super bosses was about restricting what you could do, forcing you to use a very specific setup to win.
Yeah it wasn't difficult just super annoying and soulless and boring.
This, it was made worse by my team insisting on the hardest difficulty (heroic? Legendary? Can't remember).
Destroyed the game for me.
I don't remember the fireballs being quite that bad when I played the TG16 version.The final boss of Ys I is the reason I'm never replaying this game
The terrible design of the BBS bosses is a result of how broken the defensive capabilities of the player are.
Pretty much the only way to make post-game bosses challenging in that game is to fight fire with fire and go nuts.
The fight is really just about finding a way to survive the fire breath attack, since the other attacks are super slow.
If you can do that, you win. Well, it's still going to take a while.
Pretty much the only way to make post-game bosses challenging in that game is to fight fire with fire and go nuts.
Yeah, I have to go with this one as well.For me, it's Ancient Dragon in Dark Souls II (vanilla, not SotFS edition).
A supremely tedious and boring fight because he has a ton of health and a very simple moveset yet can nonetheless one-shot most players with his AoE fire attack. The whole experience is made worse by the long gauntlet of Drakekeepers and Dragon Knights you have to run past on every attempt.
He's a lot more reasonable in SotFS, but man, vanilla AD was just an awful experience.
He's extremely easy to cheese by throwing poison knives from the safety of the hallway. Fighting him "honorably" on the rooftop can be pretty damned tough, though, for sure.
The fight is really just about finding a way to survive the fire breath attack, since the other attacks are super slow.
If you can do that, you win. Well, it's still going to take a while.
