My Top 10 Tedious Boss Fights

 

In honor of Romancing SaGa 2's terrible final boss, today I'm looking at a bunch of tedious boss fights. These are fights that gave me varying degrees of grief, not necessarily because of the difficulty, but because of their tedious elements. You know the type of fight, the kind you want to skip every time you replay a game.

Honorable Mention: Everything in Dawn of Sorrow (DS) - Simply for the glyph-drawing mechanic at the end of every boss fight. Fail and the boss gets back like 30% of its health. Over and over. What an annoying, obnoxious mechanic, added only because of what system it was on. Was there a rule that every game had to incorporate the stylus somewhere? Unfortunately the recent re-release isn't much better, changing it to a code-entering system while retaining the ultra-strict time limits and harsh failure penalties. At least that version lets you rewind, but why would you want to be forced to rewind? They dropped the ball with this one in the port (compared to the other two which are fine). The original takes the cake though. It's one of the best Castlevania games of all time and they nearly up-ended that with the stylus mechanics.

Honorable Mention: Star Fox Zero (Wii U) - The final boss of this game was super tedious, mainly because of the extremely lengthy run-back if you lost. And lose you do, over and over. However I'm going to try to avoid including things in this list just because they have bad runbacks. Tons of games have bad runbacks, especially early NES titles. Going to focus on the tedium of the actual boss fights.

10. Opiomorph / Miang - Xenogears (PS1) - Starting off by immediately breaking that rule a bit. Most of the tedium of this fight comes from the time it takes to get back to the fight if you lose. But also, there's more to it than that. If your party isn't prepared, tough, because you can't leave. At least not without a ton of backtracking. Xenogears, as good as it is, has a number of spots where you get boxed in and can't leave, and if you're unprepared, good luck. This is the toughest fight in Xenogears and it isn't necessarily because of any interesting fight mechanics, but rather because of the massive overtuning of her gear's damage output. Having to go through another boss fight just to get back to her on a loss is also pretty bad.

9. Seraph Sephiroth - Final Fantasy VII (PS1) - One word: Supernova. Maybe the first time I ever found a boss fight in a game to be truly tedious was when I had to sit through multiple casts of Sephiroth's super-move. It's like "get to the point already". They really wanted to get the most out of the storage space on CDs with those big FMVs, I get it.

8. Flame Hyenard - Mega Man X7 (PS2) - Six words: "Burn! Burn! Burn to the ground". Giving bosses voices was a terrible idea and led to some of the most brutal, nails-on-chalkboard boss fights in gaming history. Flame Hyenard is certainly the worst of the lot (and woe to you if you have to fight him multiple times), but let's not forget about Tornado Tonion or that kangaroo dweeb either. This game is terrible on every level, but nowhere is that more evident than every time a boss opens their mouth.

7. Lady Nevedaria - Everquest (PC) - This spiny blue dragon is one of, if not THE deadliest fight in the first 3 years or so of the game's life. While most dragons have AOE damage breath of one element or another, this thing has a very hard to resist AOE stun breath that also spins you around. So you'll have a really bad time as any melee-based class that has to stay in the fight (as in, not duck behind a wall to avoid the AOE when fighting at range). The fight goes on for ages too. The one fight in early EQ that is so tedious that you'll want your computer to crash for a few minutes so you miss it.

6. That Crash Bomb Boss - Mega Man 2 (NES) - Speaking of crashing, this obnoxious fight. If you know what you're doing it isn't awful, but on a first-time playthrough on an NES, it's pretty bad. While the pods stay gone if you die and have to try again, so does your Crash Bomb ammo. Run out of that and it essentially forces you to game over to do the stage again, which takes away all of your stored E-Tanks. Awful thing to go through as a first-time player, to say the least.

5. Bed of Chaos - Dark Souls (PS3+) - This is basically a remake of the Crash Bomb Boss, in that you have to take out multiple stationary pods around the room to win and they actually stay dead if you die and have to start over. Like the MM2 boss, it's the only fight in this game that functions this way. The one major misstep in an often rough-around-the-edges masterpiece.

4. Neukhia - Final Fantasy Tactics A2 (DS) - The final boss of this game is a stationary pod, and a boring foe to say the least. Has a ton of HP and takes almost no damage from most normal attacks. It isn't higher on the list because a lot of the tedium of this fight is of my own design. The developers clearly intended for you to forge various super-weapons (which are mainly for postgame, I believe) late in the game that would do good damage to this fight, and I just didn't bother doing all of that side-content. Far as I'm concerned, if you could get to the final boss without doing a ton of side-content or overhauling your party, you shouldn't have to do those things to be able to adequately damage the final boss.

So I did this fight with the party that had little trouble up to that point, and it took, no joke, TWO HOURS to win the fight. And it wasn't a fun two hours. I was chipping away, healing, chipping away, buffing, rebuffing, the whole nine yards, and it kinda brought the game down a few notches for me. I liked this a lot more than the first FFTA but man, that final boss, get outta here with that. It was one of the rare occasions where I stopped and wondered why I was even bothering at all to finish a game.

3. Dorgalua - Tactics Ogre (Switch+) - This guy. This guy is miles ahead of every other fight in the main game, difficulty-wise. There's another fight right before him that repeats every time you lose. He drops vicious AOEs on you with impunity. It takes a ton of strategy to get this down, and even then it's a long, long, long fight. Good luck keeping your composure if you lose after 40 minutes of work. I think I had two characters still standing when he finally crumbled, and it took lots and lots of rewinding to keep things from spiralling out of control. If he isn't doing overpowered AOEs, he's dumping status effects on people.

It's just an ass-tastic fight across the board and there's no real way to gimp it. Well, there is: Do optional side-content and get some super-abilities that do a lot of damage. Kinda like the final boss of FFTA2. Regardless, this fight took me hours, was full of rewinding, brought down an otherwise-smooth game, and is the first thing I think of when I think of tedious boss fights. It could easily be #1 on the list if there weren't ways around it.

2. King Hydra - Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake (Switch+) - Here's a brand-new one. For what was a throwaway boss in every other version of the game, this guy is insane in the remake. He spams AOE status effects like sleep and fear, which cause your characters to miss turns, and turns on a battle-wide stopspell effect randomly that keeps you from casting for several rounds. The status effects pile up like some sort of deadly turducken.

Yeah, pretty much. It's clear that the fight was tuned with Monster Wranglers in mind, and the key to winning is to have burst DPS from your MWs before the King Hydra can really get the status effects rolling/stacking on your party. In other words, win quickly, or not at all. With my caster-heavy party, I was completely neutered here myself and would have had to go and class-change one or two of my Sages into MWs and re-level to have a fair shot in the postgame. At that point I just didn't feel like having to overhaul my party at the 11th hour. I'll get into it more when I get to that point in the posts for the game.

Between the status effects and his health regeneration, it's very difficult to get the fight under control once it starts getting out of control. I'm not even sure if this fight is necessarily hard so much as it is incredibly tedious and tiring. Even with status effect resistance accessories equipped, his sleep AOEs were still regularly landing. Once my characters finally managed to shake their sleep and fear statuses enough to mount a real comeback, whoops, the stopspell effect is back over the field and nobody can cast or do anything for 3 rounds. Just a garbage fight and one that'll probably get nerfed if they ever patch the game.

1. The Seven Hero Amalgamation - Romancing Saga 2 (Switch) - Another "status effect hell" fight. The boss takes more turns as it loses more HP, and around halfway through it tops out at SEVEN TURNS per round. One of the most common attacks is Temptation, which charms all male characters. So your male characters are basically enemies for most of this fight, congratulations. If you were lucky enough to spark Temptation resist on the one other boss in the game that uses it, then you at least have a fighting chance against the boss and its seven turns.

Making things worse, if you saved your game on the bridge before the fight, you can't leave and have to restart the game (at least it has New Game Plus at any time, but still, imagine having to do that right before the final boss when you're probably ready to be done with the game). There's another fairly lengthy boss fight before this that has to be repeated every time you lose to this boss, and lose you will without a ton of preparation that requires having a heads-up or being psychic.

Since I couldn't go back and get Temptation resist, I ended up grinding for like six hours to get everyone as powerful as I could muster, while totally overhauling my character lineup. And even then the fight was ass and a half. In my hours of grinding I somehow didn't spark a lot of the best moves (despite trying my darndest), and ended up using the ultra-cheap Hasten Time spell to get the upper hand on the boss and gimp the fight. This fight was so tedious and annoying that it prompted me to make this list to begin with.