My Top Twenty Tedious Boss Fights

 

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.

Note: Originally posted in 2024, this was a top ten of mostly RPGs. I was doing a new list with non-RPGs and then decided to just combine it with the old one to make a Top 20. So about half of this is new. New content is in BOLD.

Dishonorable Mention: Every Fighting Game Ever That Gives You One Try At The Final Boss - These "bonus round" type final bosses can go fly a kite. Dural in Virtua Fighter, that demon beast at the end of Ehrgeiz.

Dishonorable Mention: All Lufia games after Lufia 2 - Since none of them had Arek as a final boss. You don't introduce a Bigger Bad / Higher Power character and then never pay it off in any sequels.

Dishonorable 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.

Dishonorable 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.

Dishonorable Mention: Senator Armstrong - Metal Gear Rising (PS3) - Great game here and the final boss isn't really annoying for any good enough reason to put it on the list. No, he's just a huge power level leap over the rest of the game, and has been known to end people's attempts at playing through the game on higher difficulty. I myself had to tap out on Medium in the 11th hour and turn the difficulty down to Easy just to get this guy out of the way. He's just way too strong.

20. Too Strong - Bebe's Kids (SNES) - This thing isn't hard except that it takes like 100 hits to defeat. Your only real means to do damage is by flinging a turd at him (seriously, that thing you pick up and throw for the entire fight is a turd) and it somehow manages to miss almost every throw. You're throwing a turd back and forth and missing this guy over and over. It's apropos for the entire game. This should have been #1.

19. Ken, Jaquio and Jashin - Ninja Gaiden (NES) - The fights themselves are fine, the problem is that due to a glitch, losing any of them forces you back to the beginning of the last world. Forget all the stages and checkpoints, you gotta do everything again! It's ridiculous. At least each boss stays down once defeated. Still, having to play World 6 over and over again usually accounts for like 80% of the game's runtime.

18. Opiomorph / Miang - Xenogears (PS1) - 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.

17. 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.

16. Rogue - Lords of the Fallen (PS3) - A final boss that is such a damage sponge and such a broken fight that I had to resort to cheese tactics to win, trapping him in a doorway so I could wail away with impunity. Finished the rest of the game without issue, then the devs decided to go off into la-la land with this last fight.

15. Scumocide - Captain Commando (Arcade) - This guy alternates between freezing you and torching you every time you try to hit him. He moves a lot faster than your character, since this is a beat 'em up from 1991. The fight absolutely sucks and is designed to take a bunch of your quarters at the last second. It's much easier with a second player, so at least there's that.

14. 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.

13. 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.

12. 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.

11. 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.

10. The Dalai Llama - Brutal: Paws of Fury (SNES) - This is an input-reading fest that is completely unfair. No matter what you do, he does the counter to it. Eventually I found one move that the computer had issues countering (a jump kick, which he blocked, followed immediately by a low kick) and had to spam that over and over again to eventually whittle him down.

9. Boss Rush - TMNT Radical Rescue (Game Boy) - At the end of the game are four bosses back-to-back. You get one full heal (E-Tank) for all of them, and it stays gone if you die and have to go again (making further attempts basically impossible). That's the annoying part. Would it have killed them to just have you pick it up AFTER the checkpoint, as you're walking into the boss rooms? Nope, you get one try at this and that's it, it's twice as hard as it should be forever after that. You can either replay the game and make sure you get it on the first try next time, or you can fight them over and over until you master the fights to the point that you can beat them without any heals.

8. Dracula - Castlevania: Dracula-X (SNES) - While Rondo of Blood had a normal final boss, this subpar remake of it decided we needed to put an extra spin on the final battle. So they filled the room with pits! You're stuck fighting Dracula on a bunch of pillar-platforms, and if you get hit, chances are you're going right into one of the pits. This makes it possibly the hardest final battle in the 'Vania series, and not in a good way where you're being challenged. More like a frustrating and lame way where you fall into pits a zillion times because he landed one lucky hit when you were doing well otherwise.

7. 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.

6. 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.

5. Spider Gremlin - Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Game Boy) - A fight that makes me kind of ill to even think about, given that Gremlins 2 is a game I wanted to play since I was a kid, finally got to fairly recently, and found to be probably the worst game I ever played on the Game Boy. After a nearly-impossible final level where you spend a large portion of the level not actually being able to see your character or where you're going, the game drops you into this cool-looking final battle that SHOULD be one of the game's better moments, but instead you're just freaking out because you made it with whatever little bit of health you have left. The game gives you a ranged weapon (bow and arrow) for the first time all game, and no time to practice using it. Considering that you shoot fire arrows, it would have been nice if you got the bow for all of the last level (or better yet, the whole game) and just the fire arrow upgrade at the end. Worst part is, the attacks of the boss are pretty much unavoidable, so you need to defeat it before it defeats you. Which means doing perfectly-aimed shots over and over and not missing. On your first try. With no practice using the new weapon. Everything about this is miserable.

4. 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.

3. 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 in the last area 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). It's pretty inexplicable too; there's no real legitimate reason why you can't leave. The dungeon didn't cave in behind you or anything. No, your character just goes "I can't turn back now!" and flat-out refuses to leave the room. 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.

2. Mother Brain - Metroid 1 (NES) - The fight that prompted me to remake this list. What an awful, annoying final battle. The barriers before Mother Brain are their own hassle, but at least they stay down if you leave to refill your missiles. The worst part is the never-ending energy rings that tend to spawn at the worst possible angles and juggle you around. The lava pit right before Mother Brain can be hard to get back out if you fall in, and everything about this just feels super awkward. Speedrunners have cracked ways to make this fight a lot easier by reducing the amount of rings onscreen, but for most players there's no real way to gimp this.

1. The Flea Queen - Plok (SNES) - They make you use spring shoes for this fight, the worst accessory in the game, and one you've had zero practice with before this. Like the Gremlins 2 final boss, this fight forces a new mechanic on you at the last second just for this fight. Difference is, the bow+arrow is cool, while the spring shoes in Plok are the worst powerup in the entire game. You're bouncing all over the place like an idiot while trying to fight this boss, and get no prior opportunity to get used to the controls of said shoes. As if this game wasn't already hard enough. This final battle is so near-impossible that I had to cheat like crazy with save states, and even with save states it was nearly impossible because I was just constantly bouncing directly into various hazards.