The Top 17 Bosses That Were Tougher Than The Final Boss

Time for another list. This features a lot of RPGs. Only main story, required bosses count. No uberbosses (Ruby Weapon, FFVII), postgame bosses (Nemesis, FFX), or optional fights (Warmech, FF1) and that also includes DLC bosses for newer things. The only criteria for this list is that it's a main story boss in the main game that exceeds the final boss in difficulty, or at least causes more grief for the player than the last boss. Also, one boss per game.

Previously posted January 2020 as a list of 12, now with five new additions

NEW ADDITIONS TO THIS LIST: #17, #13, #7, #5, #1

Honorable Mention: Motaro (Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3) - Specifically the UMK3 version of this guy is ridiculously hard to beat. However, not going to put him on the list or do an in-depth listing for him because there's already too much Mortal Kombat on here and he isn't as bad as the other two on the list. Can be gimped by spamming the right series of moves.

17. Aegagropilon (Secret of Mana) - Fanha's underworld metamorphosis is a ridiculous fight. One of SoM's weaknesses is that you can generally spam magic to take down any boss in the game. There are a couple of exceptions, like the final boss, and the couple of bosses you fight before you have offensive magic (Spiky Tiger, in particular). It's no coincidence that these are the toughest fights in the game as a result. However, one fight is worse than the rest. As strong as Spiky Tiger is, bring enough healing items and it's doable. Aegagropilon on the other hand is a debacle of a fight, immediately casting Wall on itself to reflect any offensive spells. This is often followed by it spamming Wall on your characters, so you can't use defensive or healing spells either. In essence, magic is rendered useless for this battle.

The boss then turns the tables on the player, spamming attack magic (namely, the Burst spell) over and over in a way that can stunlock your characters. Bring healing items, Cup of Wishes, and use charged attacks on the center as fast and hard as possible and hope for the best. The Whip is what I usually found to work the best here. This fight ended my second run at SoM, in early 1996, on a rental (my first rental, in 1994, ended very early, with Fire Gigas, but by 1996 I at least knew how to RPG). On the third run the following Winter, I got through the whole game.

16. Living Ice (Lost Odyssey) - This fight is less "tough" and more just a complete pain in the ass. The boss is immune to magic and yet you fight it at a point in time when you're stuck with a party of casters. The one melee-based character you have access to here is a lower-tier character that most players likely wouldn't have used much before this, meaning he'll be underleveled while also being your main damage dealer. The fight itself isn't too bad, but it was so poorly set up that it ends up being more of a roadblock than the final boss.

15. Yellow Devil (Mega Man 1) - This thing appears in a bunch of Mega Man games, but it's by far the toughest in the original Mega Man. In that game it overshadows every other boss, including the final boss. The only reason it isn't higher on the list is that the game gives you an out: You can use the Elec Beam pause trick to defeat it in one or two shots.

14. Ridley (Super Metroid) - Ridley is the big challenge of Super Metroid's endgame, in my view. Without enough energy tanks, super missiles, or the Wave Beam, he can be a complete roadblock to finishing the game. On the other hand, the final boss is more of a test of your ability to fire diagonally, with easier-to-avoid attacks compared to Ridley's all-out assault. The Draygon fight in Maridia is ALSO tougher than the final boss, and debatably worse than Ridley, but it isn't included here over Ridley because you have an out with a convenient insta-kill trick if all else fails.

13. Jaguar God (Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure) - This thing completely upstages the final boss on every level. First time through the game, I thought this WAS the final boss. It's a much tougher fight and a much cooler fight. This guy is bad-ass, transforming between a caped claw-swinging beast and a jaguar that leaps around the screen. The final boss, by comparison, is a big slow rock golem. This thing would be ranked higher if it were a more difficult fight, because as it is you can spam him with the smart bomb / magic grenade things. Especially if you bring 12 of them like I did here.

12. Barubary (Breath of Fire 2) - The second-to-last boss of this game is notably tougher than the final boss. His attacks all target the entire party, and his attack power goes up the lower his HP gets. He also challenges the hero to a one-on-one fight midway through, and accepting this challenge makes it even more difficult. However, if you don't accept the challenge, there's a good chance he'll knock your fusions off so you won't have them for the final boss. All told, this is a truly grueling battle that they dropped right before the comparatively-manageable finale.

11. Balzack (Dragon Quest 4, NES version) - In the NES version of Dragon Quest 4, you couldn't control your non-hero party members in battle, and the AI was astonishingly bad at times. For this fight, main healer Cristo would spend a lot of time trying to cast instant death spells on the boss (to no effect) instead of healing. The boss, meanwhile, unleashes absolute hell with AOE attacks aplenty. Having Nara as a healer works a little better, even though her heals aren't as good at this point. There are ways to mitigate Balzack's damage, like spell shield. Unfortunately that spell also makes it more difficult to keep your party healed, and does nothing to stop Balzack's physical attacks. This thing is a massive step up from every boss fight before this point and gave me more grief than even the final boss did. The difficulty of this fight really comes down to how bad the AI is.

10. Bloodbane (Valkyrie Profile) - This guy restores nearly all of his HP every ten rounds, and he has a lot of HP. There are game mechanics that you can use to bring him down, and up to this point those mechanics are never particularly necessary to use during the game. As a result, a lot of players get to this point only to run into a brick wall where they have to stop and essentially re-learn the gameplay to account for the mechanics that allow this fight to be winnable.

9. Boozoo (Lennus 2) - The hardest fight in Lennus 2, easily. It's near the end of the game, and the boss himself has a higher damage output than the final boss. Even for a lategame fight, this guy is wildly overpowered for the point in time that you fight him in the aptly-named Boozoo's Ice Castle. The main thing that makes him a completely insane boss is that his big attacks don't distribute damage evenly. So you end up with these attacks that hit the party 12 times randomly, and if most of them land on one or two characters, those characters are knocked out. You basically have to hope that his damage gets distributed somewhat evenly, and spam defensive spells that block damage. The fight is absolutely nuts. Luckily, you can level up pretty fast in the areas before him, and overleveling mitigates some of the difficulty here. Read about my own dealings with Boozoo in Lennus 2 here.

8. Borgan (Lunar: Silver Star Story, Sega CD version) - This guy is a nightmare, largely because it's easy to be under-leveled for the fight and his difficulty is very poorly tuned for that point in the game. He's a bit like Culex in Mario RPG in that he's got a few orbs with him that attack independently, making the fight that even more difficult. The problem is that he's a required main story fight, and at a point in the game when most players will be in no way prepared for a fight of that magnitude. They nerfed him in the PS1 remake at least. All in all, this guy is an impressive relic of a time when one off-balance boss could bring an RPG playthrough to a complete standstill for underleveled players.

7. Sodom (Final Fight) - While most of this game is pretty doable if you bob and weave, stick and move... this guy is basically a cheat code in boss form. He uses dashing attacks that are basically unavoidable (especially with the slow Haggar) and tends to spam them. His reach, with his dual swords, is far more than your characters have. While some later bosses (Rolento, the final boss) are pretty bad as well, this guy is very early in the game and WAY too tough for the point where you encounter him. He filters out a lot of players, and filtered me out when I rented the game. I had a much easier time with the two (otherwise not as good) sequels, and didn't actually beat the original game until 2019 when I played Final Fight CD for the Sega CD. Seriously, this guy needed a nerf.

6. Kintaro (Mortal Kombat 2) - Kintaro STILL gives me problems, to this day, even on Very Easy. There are a few moves that work well on this guy, like Liu Kang's Bicycle Kick, but it's still hit-or-miss whether any of them will land. Kintaro loves to block and some of his counterattacks are almost unavoidable, like the air-stomp. The key is to attack when he taunts, if you get the chance. Shao Khan is similarly OP, but he doesn't have the air-stomp and he taunts a lot more, giving you more chances to attack. Kintaro is such a beast, and makes MK1 Goro look like a lumbering dork in comparison. That said...

5. Goro (Mortal Kombat 4) - The MK4 version of Goro, on the other hand, is fast, furious, and similar to Kintaro in ass-kicking prowess. Apparently this guy isn't even in the arcade version, and was added in specifically for home versions so that Shinnok would have a sub-boss (why not Quan-Chi, who is missing altogether from the arcade ladders?) before the main event. Well, like Kintaro and Motaro before him, this guy is a beast and a half. The previous games had Shao Kahn as a tough final boss after the tougher sub-boss, while this one has the joke that is Shinnok. There's a vast gulf between the difficulty of Goro and what is basically just a regular opponent with Shinnok. Goro has way more HP than a regular fighter and hits 2x as hard with every equivalent move. He's basically a cheat code, used against you.

At least this fight has awesome music. This music conveys the message that you're about to get crushed.

4. Golem Twins (Chrono Trigger) - These things are complete beasts, emulating the elements you use against them and firing back with extremely powerful versions of them. Shortly before this you fight Giga Gaia, which is also a difficult "elemental damage check" fight that gets significantly easier with elemental armor equipped. At least that fight can be lessened by taking out the hands temporarily. Golem Twins are like fighting two Giga Gaias that always have the hands up. If you missed out on the secret elemental armor like I did the first time I played, the best thing you can hope for at this point is that you have a couple Ruby Vests to at least blunt fire damage somewhat. From there, just get them to copy fire damage for the entire fight and you might be able to eke out a win.

The first time I played Chrono Trigger this was BY FAR the hardest fight in the game. Like many fights on this list, knowing what you're doing will significantly nerf the fight, but on a first run, being unaware of elemental damage? Yeah, this fight is a roadblock. It also punishes you tremendously for using physical damage, something you're able to rely on for the entire game up to that point. Any usage of physical damage will be retaliated against with a massive (400+ point) physical attack against one character. And on top of all of these retaliatory strikes, they also spam Iron Ball which halves HP.

3. Miang/Opiomorph (Xenogears) - This boss only has one attack, but it's a devastating AOE, so healing is paramount. Problem is, you need fuel to heal, and there's another boss fight right before this one that for whatever reason has fuel-draining attacks. So by the time you get to the Miang fight, your characters are already weakened significantly and have little defense against Miang's overpowered AOE spam. Combine all of this with the fact that you have about 10 minutes of cutscenes/fighting to do before this boss every time you lose, and it makes for a rough situation that gave people more grief than the actual final boss did.

2. Belias (Final Fantasy Tactics) - Yet another B-name as the list winds towards a close. The list that almost could have been a list of bosses with B-names. I almost forgot about this guy when compiling the list, which is funny because he's hands-down one of the best examples of this list's premise. Many of the problems I cited in above fights return here, plus new problems, to make for a fight that is roundly difficult and a game-ender for many players. Considering it's only about 60% of the way through the game, it blows away the relatively normal-difficulty final boss.

For one thing, you have to do a separate one-on-one fight right before this with no saves in-between, and that fight on its own is very difficult. Get past that and you get to contend with Belias, who has blistering AOEs and a group of minions launching their own attacks. Lose, and you get to fight the previous difficult boss again.

On top of all of this, you can't leave if you save within this dungeon, so there's no chance of going off to level or build up your party once you run into the brick wall that is Belias. On the bright side, having to replay the whole game up to this point isn't exactly the worst thing, since the game is so brilliant. And being crushed in this fight is a great impetus to really figure the game out and develop an OP party that can annihilate him on the second go.

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1. Ornstein and Smough (Dark Souls) - While there are worse fights in the game - Four Kings and Bed of Chaos especially, as I find Four Kings to be more of a roadblock for most builds than O&S - this fight is much earlier in the game than those fights are. You're a lot more likely to be caught off-guard with this one. This fight is also before you gain the warp ability, while the game is still following the first half linearity. You're boxed into Anor Londo until you win the fight; no going elsewhere and trying other things, like you can do with those fights. So basically...you have to fight with whatever you've got. The Giant Blacksmith nearby is a key ally, hopefully you've got a weapon that can be powered up to a good degree there. Solaire also has a summon sign on the stairs before this, if no player summons are available. Solaire evens up the fight by making it a 2-on-2. So there are ways to win, no doubt. Due to how early in the game this is, how many playthroughs it stalled out, and how rough of an area Anor Londo is, this takes the top spot for the toughest challenge outside of a final boss.