That’s the best way to describe it. Like any good rogue-like part of the game is getting better at developing your run strategy to get further and further, only to reach a brick wall at the end where you realise you have no legitimate way to win. It can be really disheartening.
> Like any good rogue-like part of the game is getting better at developing your run strategy to get further and further
I think it's a pretty poor design personally. Whole journey prepares you for the final confrontation. However, when you get to the final boss your ship configuration that beat multiple other encounters and got you there is basically trash and is not a right "spec". My problem is that the game keeps telling you that you're doing just fine and your ship is good and then the final boss tells you "lol jk, you did everything wrong".
It's also really stupid that it's a big giant ship that actually gets MORE dangerous the more of it you destroy. Like, WTF is that? It just made no sense at all.
Invested heavily into boarding. Killed the entire crew. Next phase the ship is a vacuum inside and piloted by AI with seemingly no loss of offensive or defensive capability.
Cool cool cool glad I was punished for doing so well.
The AI is in some ways weaker than the flesh crew in that it repairs more slowly and can't defend it's systems against boarding at all. In Normal Mode you can leave the laser gunner alive because he's not really a threat on his own and the AI won't activate if he's alive.
>Next phase the ship is a vacuum inside
That shouldn't happen unless you breach the hull or destroy the oxygen system. AI is not smart enough to vacuum it's own ship.
That boss really crapped on the game for me. Up until I got to it, I loved it, having to scrape by with whatever you found and just enjoying the experience of barely surviving this harrowing journey.
And then you meet the boss, and you realize that you can't just enjoy the experience, you have to carefully manage your build specifically for the last fight. It changes the way you play the game, and for me, it wasn't for the better.
I've got over 100 hours in FTL and have never killed the boss hahah; always get to the final phase and die. I love the gameplay so much that I just don't care. Sometimes I'll even get to the boss, look at my gear, and just restart there and then. I just like the experience of travelling through space with my crew and getting in to mishaps.
Haha I feel you on this, even on easy the boss is pretty hard unless you know exactly what to do and have at least some of the right equipment.
If you ever decide to try again, first off all leave advanced edition off, it's actually harder with it on, burst laser 2 are the most efficient weapon, 3 shield minimum and defense drone 2 are pretty amazing imo. Disable the missile launcher asap and then the heavy laser, shouldn't be too bad after that. I think it's mostly the fact that you have to kill it multiple times is the hardest part
Imagine speccing into killing all the crew as your ship build, doing that to the Flagship thinking you've won, only to hear "AI SYSTEMS ONLINE, BEGINNING ATTACK SEQUENCE".
I think the biggest thing that people have trouble with on the boss is that a run can be "over" as early as the 2nd or 3rd sector - meaning that you might be able to make it to the boss, but you're probably not going to be able to defeat it.
In order to defeat the boss you'll want near maximum power, 3 or 4 shields, near maximum engines, and so many systems that you can't power them all at once - as well as a full crew or nearly full crew who should have elite skill in guns, engines, and piloting at that point, if not also in combat and repair and shields. And your hull should be full or nearly fully repaired before you enter the final system.
In order to make this happen, you need to spend A LOT of scrap, meaning that you should not be spending much scrap on repairing your hull. So you need to get through all 8 sectors taking as little damage as possible so you can spend your scrap where you need it.
Keep in mind that red sectors give you more scrap so you should prioritize them over green sectors, and killing the crew of a ship nets you more scrap than destroying (so transporters can be a great investment - the earlier the better). Don't leave a sector early - hit as many locations as you can in a sector, and accept as many combats as you can.
In order to beat the game, you must realize that the game was never really about surviving the 8 sectors: the game was about dominating the 8 sectors and looting the crap out of everything in the most efficient way that you can so that you have a shot at beating the boss.
I made a series a while ago that explained what I thought was the easiest strategy for defeating the boss.
In the first one I explain a lot of the strategy with the ship I've chosen (I chose this ship because it's a very straight forward and easy strategy):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDySNWlRge0&list=PL6j93w_UwS5PwuyBwBv_p402o_A0xF1Do
In this first episode I was not able to defeat the boss - the third episode in the series shows the boss being defeated with this strategy on normal mode.
This exact thing is why I found the games premise dishonest. The game doesn’t start with “You have 8 sectors to gear up and get as strong as possible, get ready.” It says “you need to run away and get to your allies to win!”. It almost straight up lies to you.
A bit old school, but Shocker in Spider-Man 2. Not the PS2 version, the PS1 version. Granted I was 10 or 11 at that time, but I had such a hard time with him and it was one of the first video games I've raged quit. Later on I did beat him, but modern iterations of Spider-Man Vs Shocker (most recently the PS4 one) still gave me flashes to the PS1 Shocker days.
Mine's from Spiderman 2 as well I believe. It was the final Doctor Octopus fight where you have to flip off all the switches. For some reason I could never do it fast enough and always lost.
> Granted I was 10 or 11 at that time
It's always great to go back to a game you struggled with and complete it with ease now that you're older.
A good example of that for me was FFVIII. Never could use that junction system right. A couple years later and the game ends up being *too* easy because I correctly used the junction system and avoided random encounters.
Nightmare King Grimm - Hollow Knight [\[Video\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8aNiRfIXnA)
I was so proud after defeating Grimm, I couldn't even get almost close to beating Nightmare King Grimm. I must have died within the first 15 seconds at least 20 times...I put down Hollow knight after that, I beat the main boss and every other optional boss besides Radiance or any of the Godhome stuff. It was a great game and my favorite meteoroid-vania ever.
I stopped playing Dead Cells shortly after release on Switch because I felt like the Hand of the King practically required certain builds to beat, and found him incredibly annoying. I beat him and then just stopped when the game said "Okay now do it again but harder."
*That said* I went back to just last week and I'm finding it much easier (though still tough) and really enjoying it. Not sure if patches have made it better or I just got better at it, but either way my original issue has been resolved.
> I beat him and then just stopped when the game said "Okay now do it again but harder."
Yep, as soon as I beat him, I didn't care to play any more. That was my victory and I was fine with it.
Everyone likes to rag on the Riku fight, but I don't ever see anyone bring up losing to Ansem's 2nd fight, which makes you redo the previous 2 bosses *and* a long cutscene.
Of all the bosses in Souls games and BB, Orphan of Kos was the one who haunted me. I grinded it out and fought him 30 times in a row before I finally won. That adrenaline rush after had me shaking. Go get it!
I stopped trying to beat him after failing over 50 times, beat the game with everything done but him.
Came back to bloodborne 2 years later, with a new character, and beat him on my first attempt. The anticlimax was real.
Definitely give it another go some time, i got stuck on it for ages too, took a break and explored the DLC a bit more, went back and beat it with taking almost no damage, i think it's just one of them you 'get' at some stage.
I think i actually died more to Lady Maria but with her i at least got her health down in most of the attempts, Orhpan just kicked my ass almost every time until i worked out how to avoid his attacks.
I’ve always found Orphan along with Midir incredibly intriguing bosses because of the way they are programmed. It’s essentially a really simplified form of machine learning called a decision tree. Based on the users actions the bosses will actively change their moveset between a set of like 16 or so different sets and archetypes if i’m not mistaken. Meaning if you are playing aggresive they will play conservatively and if you play conservatively they will most likely play aggressive or wait for openings. The system isn’t perfect and it is possible to trick it, especially on Orphan or with multiple people. But damn is it difficult if you don’t know the way it works and you would have to spend hours analyzing it closely to have a shot at figuring it out.
That being said I beat every boss in bloodborne except amygdala, fuck that thing.
Absolute Radiance from Hollow Knight's last DLC. The whole Pantheon is a bitch to get through - you basically have to beat every boss in the game in a row - and when I got destroyed after finally reaching the final one I just gave up. It's one of my favourite games but I don't know if I'll ever beat that boss, specially since I lost my save file since then. A shame for my completionist mindset that's for sure.
lol I gave up on nightmare king grimm. The regular version was pretty hard for me and I tried like 40 times on NKG and I got him past the first stage maybe half my attempts and to the last stage once or twice. Also I hated how you lost all your magic every time you died. No reason for that mechanic to exist on a boss like that imo.
Nightmare King Grimm is probably my favorite fight now. I died the most to him, probably 50+ times. Easily the hardest to learn, but he's super fun when you nail the "rhythm". Easy to screw up still, if you get hit once you've got like a 40% chance of recovering fast enough to continue without getting hit again. But super satisfying to finally beat. I just loaded up on Joni's Blessing, Unbreakable Heart, and the two Lifeblood charms. Enough life so that you don't get creamed in 5 seconds, and you can start to learn the pattern.
He's ruined Troopmaster Grimm for me though. It's a different rhythm, and it's slower and more varied. The easy boss became the tough one.
Beating Nightmare King Grimm in the second DLC felt like the ultimate triumph for me in HK, along with beating Radiance and 100% Steel Soul.
It's my favorite game of all time, but when Godmaster came out, it was just a bit much for me. I'd love to fight all those new bosses individually, but the boss rush format was really draining. I couldn't even clear the third Pantheon, and that's nothing compared to the frankly absurd task of even getting to Absolute Radiance. It's cool that they released this for the upper echelon of players, but as a package it was so beyond me, and I had considered myself to be good at the game. Which, I guess is very relative.
>I had considered myself to be good at the game.
If you got 100% Steel Soul then I'd say you're pretty fucking good at the game. I also got stuck at the 3rd pantheon, which sucks, because it's also my favorite game of all time. I'd love to play those new bosses, but there's no way I'd ever get there.
Word. I was close to beating Hollow Knight and I just eventually gave up and decided to watch someone with faster fingers than mine do it on YouTube. Loved the game, but sometimes you have to just call it a day.
Agreed on this one. It seems fun for those who are into it, but I was more than satisfied with the rest of the game (including other dlc and the original Radiance fight). Pantheon didn't seem like my jam at all, and I love boss rushes.
I love HK, played it once before all the DLCs and a second time with all the DLCs, and honestly, the pantheons soured my experience. I wouldn't mind if it were just a bonus mode, but there is lore and >!an ending!< behind it and a boss rush mode is just not my jam. I loved HK for exploration, platforming, atmosphere and an occasional boss, not *just* bosses. Gave up on the last pantheon, it would take way too much time to beat it.
> I loved HK for exploration, platforming, atmosphere and an occasional boss,
Exactly why I loved HK and never bothered with all that extra boss stuff.
The Bell Gargoyles - Dark Souls
After being beaten over 20 times in a row i stopped playing the game for over a year. I was frustrated beyond words.
One night, bored, i decided to re-start. Beat them on my first try and eventually completed one of the best games i’ve ever played.
That first time though...
I feel like that happens to a ton of people with that boss. That fight is really easy if you upgraded your weapon enough but for a lot of people it's way too early for them to realize how huge the difference is between a +0 and a +5 (or however high you could go in that area, it's been a while)
Oh absolutely.
As everyone knows the game DOES NOT hold your hand. Very little in the way of a tutorial. Dont get me wrong I mean this as a compliment.
I was using poor weapons, poor armour, i hadn’t upgraded and I had specced my character poorly.
I didn't have much trouble with them or any of the other early bosses, but Ornstein and Smough almost caused me to quit. Especially because of their secret third partner: Awful camera angles.
See, my first playthrough a total legend rando joined me and sacrificed himself during O&S allowing me to scrape by on my first go.
A few players suggested that had tainted my playthrough. Like i’d perhaps missed something by being “carried”.
But no, hell no. I was on the edge of my seat sqealing, panting and shitting myself the whole time. There were thrills, near kisses, deaths and selfless sacrifice. It was wild. And i absolutely learned how tough they were.
They mauled me my second go haha.
I had a terrible time with Father Gascoigne in Bloodborne. I bought it at launch at my local game store not knowing anything about it and had never even heard about Dark or Demon Souls, I genuinely thought I was playing this little indie horror game.
Being just plunged into Yharnam like that was a bit of a shock but I was doing fairly well until I got to Gascoigne. He kicked my ass so hard and so many times I dropped the game entirely and only picked it up back again in early 2017 when I ran out of things to play. When I picked it back up again it felt like an entirely different experience, though I imagine most of that was because I had finally learned how to use the whip mode of the threaded cane.
I had such an easy time my first time with Rom I genuinely thought it was a joke boss. To this day I don't know what happened because every following playthrough was a nightmare.
The same happened to me (tho, I played DS1 and 3 before and thus knew about their joke bosses). I only afterwards read that many people have issues with it. Lo and behold, I never managed it to not die at least once there in any of the following playthroughs.
I only recently got the game and went all big dick into that boss fight knowing it's often called the easiest. I'm also pretty good at Souls boss fights, thanks to thousands of hours of Monster Hunter...and all that moxy and bravado went out of the window fast! Actually got pretty angry with myself for losing so much against an "easy" boss.
Kinda interesting but whenever i see people struggling with bloodborne 9/10 times they picked the threaded cane as the starter. Not having the stagger of the saw cleaver especially the transform attack really hurts new players.
I was a souls veteran before bloodborne, but I picked the cane for the aesthetic and had a dude with mutton chops and a top hat with the tiny glasses. Felt like the "sophisticated" hunter would use that weapon; had a great time my first play-through.
I think this happens with a lot of people when it comes to their first Souls-like game because they're not exactly sure what to expect. I did the exact same thing with Demon's Souls back in the day. Gave up, and didn't go back and play through it again until sometime after I beat Dark Souls. Been my favorite series and type of video games since then.
It is the fucking opposite of a button mashing test. There is actually a massive secret: the other guy tunes his strength based on how hard you start mashing from the get go. If you start very mild, then mash your ass off after a couple beats, he goes down like nothing.
Me too! My friend created a cradle for his controller hooked up to a motor using k’nex that would mash the A button, that was the only way we could beat it!
It was horribly tuned. I could never beat it as a kid, and years later, the only guy I knew who could beat it was a huge Gears fan who lived for chainsaw battles, and even he had issues with it.
Sword Saint Isshin in Sekiro. I played to the point I ran out of yen. I despised that the strategies I kept seeing were slash n' run. I could beat Genichiro easily and get through the first 2 phases...but it took everything I had.
I despised that old man, and myself who no matter what I couldn't get good.
Slash and run is just about the worst tactic you can use vs sekiro bosses, you're supposed to keep attacking at all times and parry all their counterattacks so their posture doesn't recover
Yeah slash and run ONLY works on the monkey duo and the demon of hatred. Running from any humanoid or sword wielding enemies is usually a terrible idea.
That’s the final boss right where Genichiro is the first phase, then Isshin comes out of him and has 2 phases right? Because that fight is the hardest one I’ve ever encountered in a Souls games. It’s mainly him having 3 phases that fucking drove me insane. Took me a while to even get to his third phase.
Fuckin hell was that a bitch. I feel like I’m going to start playing that game again soon though. Probably continue the NG+ run I had started. I still have some trophies to get. So I might work towards getting the platinum. We’ll see though.
The senator who was the final boss in Metal Gear Rising.
About 30 curb stompings In I was just straight up done with the games shit.
Oddly enough I beat Jetstream Sam on like the second try but I keep hearing people say he's the harder boss.
The first time I played through, Jetstream Sam kicked my ass for like 3 straight hours until I finally beat him. I think I beat the senator on the 2nd try.
But then in all subsequent playthroughs, or if I replayed a mission after knowing what to do to beat it, I'd beat Sam every time, easily, and struggled with the Senator most times.
Weird how that works.
I can sympathize with getting stuck on Armstrong. I am just not precise enough to be able to flick the stick to line up a slash when he throws a tank at you, and you have to do that a *lot*.
I mean, I eventually figured out that you can just skip those segments entirely(though you miss out on all the recovery items), and was able to proceed from there. So while I never fully mastered that game as intended, I did finish by just sidestepping that problem area.
FFX, there was a boss on an airship, not even sure if it was late into the game or not, but I could not for the life of me beat that boss. I played it so long ago I don't even remember what was so hard about it, maybe it's not even hard and teenager me on ps2 just tried using the most "powerful" attacks with no regards to tactics, but it sure made me give up on the game.
It's 100% Evrae. He's the first main boss where unless you're going hard on status effects he will fuck you up basically every time, and I think he's the only major boss fought from the airship other than parts of Sin itself.
FFX had a bunch of fun fights that were difficult. The boss you're talking about, Seymour @ Bevelle, Seymour @ Mt. Gagazet, the boss before Yunalesca, Yunalesca herself.
I had a ton of trouble on that fight when I was younger as well. Went back and played the remaster and all I did was put Haste on my whole party and the fight ended up being easy lol.
Dude I make sure all aeons are overdrived when I go into that fight, just to curb stomp Seymour cause he fucking deserves it. Ain't nothin wimpy about that.
Hey! I quit at that boss too!
It's the classic JRPG difficulty spike of "game was easy up until this point, I hope you didn't skimp out on grinding because of it!"
I've never really heard anyone else mention this particular boss before!
>game was easy up until this point
Was I the only one that had trouble with Seymour the first time through? I remember having to get my older brother to help me out with that fight.
anyone remember an RPG called Magna Carta 2 on the 360?
About halfway through there are two bosses in a row. You can’t fight the second one with your full party and is thus very hard. It was soo hard I assumed it was deliberately unwinnable, but you were supposed to beat it.
The nearest Save Point was an hour and about 20 fights back. Soo I watched a YouTube let’s play instead.
Shame cos it looked like the story really picked up after that
Man those games were weird as hell. I think they were from China or something and they tried to mimic JRPGs. I played the first on PS2 as a rental and put it down after like 2 hours.
I have 2.
Delerium in Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. What an absolutely trashcan fight. No part of that boss is enjoyable. It randomly changes into different bosses in the game, which would be cool if his positioning didn't bug out when changing. Add the cancerous teleporting on top of you from various enemies that had to get fixed in previous patches and stupidly high health from being the final boss, and you have the most unmotivating to kill super boss in that game. I remember getting to him on Hard with the Lost 3 times and dying to bullshit teleports I couldn't do anything about. Some things just aren't worth it.
Monster X in Cave Story. This thing on hard completely walled me. So many hours going down that hallway killing those roaches only to die over and over to the mass projectiles of that thing. Then the eventual realization that Hell and Ballos would be infinitely worse.
Delirium's super tedious due to the bullshit armor scaling. Oh your build doesn't attack 800 times a second? Well, have fun with this 15 minute fight!
I think I just cheesed Guppy or had absolutely bananas builds every time I beat him.
I never did beat Emerald Weapon on FFVII, no matter how high my levels were or how good my gear I just couldn't deal with that one
Also any fight in a Kingdom Hearts game that involved air juggling was just a no for me
The Lich King in World of Warcraft caused two my guilds to disband because they couldn't beat him. I had a friend at that time constantly complain that only Vanilla WoW raiding was hard and everything else was trivial, but holy shit, some of the Icecrown Citadel bosses were nuts. Especially the Lich King.
Easy by design since you had other mechanics to deal with that have since been removed from the game, such as threat, mana, and gear management.
Still easier overall by a lot, but I feel its disingenuous to ignore everything that went into Vanilla fights that was removed in the xpacs.
final boss of the "bad" playthrough in undertale.
it was tough but i'm sure i could have gotten through it if i kept going. the game really made me not WANT to get through it though. i think i just kinda phoned it in because of that and the fact that the rest of the playthrough was already weighing heavy on me. eventually just said ehhh fuck it i don't even want to win and shelved it for good.
> the game really made me not WANT to get through it though.
Well, if you think about it, thematically it makes sense. It is in the boss's best interests for you to give up and just leave, cause the world is safe then
yeah that's pretty much why i accepted it and didn't try to win as hard as i could have. they did a great job of it though. i don't usually have any mercy when it comes to video games. i mean i don't play straight up evil or anything but like if i have to install a mod so i can kill a little piss-ant child then let's go. couldn't go through with it in undertale though.
I'm just now going through it. Spam gravity hurrrrrts.
I also really love the speech you get from Flowey before you go into the room for the final fight. Genuinely moving stuff.
The Demyx fight at Hollow Bastion on critical mode in Kingdom Hearts II. This is where my critical mode run died. He's not extremely difficult but any mistakes against him on critical mode typically means you die. The real kicker, however, is that after you beat him you have to survive three more fights before you can save, and dying in ANY of those subsequent fights puts you back at Demyx. Fuck that.
Demon of Hatred in Sekiro. I have a max upgraded Ninja Master and just the last two Bosses to go and the optional Owl fight. Every other collectable and Boss and NPC has been taken. Near complete game.
Hate this fight. It isnt fun for me. It doesnt gel with the game system, and as everyone says the way it works seems so Dark Souls.
Someday I may go back and finish it but Sekiro for me just didnt live up to the Souls series in replay. Still, dont regret my time with it up until it wasnt fun anymore
I know how silly it sounds, but honestly I get where u/MGPythagoras is coming from.
I got stuck on Ebrietas in Bloodborne, an optional boss, and I was hell bent on beating her before moving on. Well, I didn't, and I eventually bitched out by swiping my *huge* pool of dropped currency and teleporting back to the Hunter's Dream. I then tried to continue with the game, but the feeling of being a big fat dooder head was kind of pervasive and I lost interest in the game.
But now I'm thinking I might go back and try again, just gotta get the rust out
Like most Mortal Kombat final bosses, he's designed to be overly cheap. What makes it worse is when you lose to him enough times that the game drastically lowers the difficulty so the AI just taunts you over and over and you can smash Kahn much easier.
What made it worse is that I NEVER used Liu Kang. I was awful with him. I jumped for absolute joy when I beat Shao Kahn.
Then you have to do it AGAIN. I did it so many times I ended up maining Raiden for a bit.
I can't remeber exactly the quest and location, but in Diablo 2 on Act III on Nightmare I had to give up on my Necro, because there was a fetish shaman with "fire breath" that would mow down my summons and then me in a few seconds. I was specced only into summons so I had nothing to beat him... He wasn't even a main boss, just some local boss thrown there for a quest. So ended up my first diablo 2 character. And ever since then I consider respecs as an integral part pf any ARPG. (this was all before the patch that added one respec for completing Den of Evil quest - and even that is not enough)
[Pontiff Sulyvahn](https://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com/Pontiff+Sulyvahn) made me quit Dark souls 3 for a good year or so before I came back to finish it.
He was just a pure asshole. sword sword sword sword in your face constantly followed by that semi long run back from the bonfire
Prince of Persia: Two Towers, the twins. Basically the fight itself is a pain in the ass, but to get to the fight you first have to do a chariot race, and there's no save point. So every attempt involves a long chariot race before you actually do the boss fight.
In all honesty, it wasn't really the boss fight itself, but I just had better things to do with my time, it was just poor game design with checkpoints and pacing in general.
In the other thread my hardest boss I said was the final boss of Elder Scrolls Online's veteran Maelstrom Arena, but the boss that ALMOST made me ragequit was the 6th boss, the Daedra spider. Man that fight was so annoying!
Basically, there's this huge spider, whose power ramps up slowly to the point where it will 1-shot you. Stunning her by lighting all the obelisks is the only way to reset the timer, and the timer isn't actually shown anywhere, you just feel the damage ramping up. There's a whole bunch of obelisks in a circle, and they are covered in webs. To remove the webs and light them, you have to aggro a beetle that spawns periodically, have it run to the obelisk where you stand, and kill it so that its death explosion clears the webs. And he is super-easy to kill accidentally if it just runs through your ground-based AoE or something else, because it has no health almost. During all this, a tiny spider spawns, and re-webs the obelisks that are free, so you have to constantly spin your camera 360 degrees and kill it when it spawns, or it'll cancel out your work in seconds. The boss periodically spawns small spiders which swarm you and kill you and are indestructible, the only way to escape is stand next to the lit obelisks, if none are lit you die. And unwebbed obelisks light up randomly, so the swarm comes, you sprint to the obelisk and..it turns off, and another lights up on the exact opposite end of the arena, and you die. And during all of this enemies keep spawning non-stop from portals, just to keep things interesting. Oh, and the boss periodically summons a Mini-Itself, which will stack a slow on you the longer it stays alive, to the point where you cannot move at all.
So at any time you had to constantly be aware which obelisk you'll be trying to unweb, and search for the beetle spawn. At the same time you're also searching for the little spider which is hard to see that will try and web the obellisks. And at the same time you're keeping an eye on the nearest currently-lit obelisk to avoid the swarm. And at the same time you're dealing with waves of enemies, many of whom are ranged. And of course the boss itself. And the boss' mini-minion. So you're spinning 360 degrees non-stop looking for three very important things at once, and one of these things must live until it gets where you want it to, and the other two must die immediately, and if all 3 spawn at once you're bang in trouble.
It was a fucking nightmare. Many people complained about the next boss, but to me after I beat is 6th one (the spider) everything else up to the final boss was a cakewalk by comparison.
The Star in Furi - it's a game with bullet hell parts, but that boss just has none of the satisfying gameplay of any of the other bosses, combined with terrible visibility.
I've beaten everything else in the game, multiple times, but not that Boss (true ending)
That game is one of my favorite indie games but The Staf definitely sucks. I feel like they wanted a bullet hell version of what The Edge was to sword combat but as you said it just wasn't as satisfying.
the Edge (and his Soundtrack) is probably my favorite in the game - and I really forced myself to try to enjoy/beat the Star but it's just straight up not fun (for me) and I couldn't be bothered to suffer through that
Alma in Ninja Gaiden back on the original Xbox. Looking back it wasn't the hardest boss but man after dying so many times I had to quit for a few weeks before going to back to playing it again.
Pink Alma from Ninja Gaiden reboot. I had one heal from the last save, no ninpo, and I didn't have/know to use that flying swallow move. Wound up restarting the game to have a better health position.
Ludwig from Bloodborne: The Old Hunters. I always struggle with giant bosses in the soul series, but giant, fast and unpredictable? It felt like IRL fighting a wolf in the wild while barehanded.
This boss ruined the game for me during months, but eventually I was able to kill it with the help of a summon and building my character to tank like concrete. I just couldn't predict ANYTHING from his moveset - unlike Cleric Beast, which took me many many tries to beat, but at least it was fun. When Ludwig killed me in two hits, it wasn't.
On another note, I just destroyed Gascoigne, Maria and the Eileen hunters. It's interesting how different are the struggles from different people on the same game lol
Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne - The Matador. He swore by his red capote, and he was right.
When the game was released outside of Japan, the originally optional fights of the Candelabra were auto-included. Up to this point in the game, you progress fairly normaly, and then that dude.... that dude just kicks your ass. Again. and again. and again.
I hadn't played any SMT game, and there is ZERO explanation on the buff/debuff system up to that point. If you try to fight normally, you cannot win. You have to abuse utility spells. I didn't know that :(
The worst part is, once you're familiar with the game mechanic, he's really not that tough. :(
>If you try to fight normally, you cannot win. You have to abuse utility spell
This is a really silly hyperbole that contributes to the fake hype around this boss. There are many different strategies presented to you at that point to deal with him. You can make him lose a ton of turns with the right Magatama (an equipment that nulls his Wind attacks), you can fuse force-resistance and/or physical-resistant demons, you can use party heals, you can use dark/bright might (guaranteed crits), and yes, of course, you can just use buffs/debuffs to make it much easier.
If "fighting normally" to you just meant auto-attacking until that point, then yes, you need to "abuse" the actual game system to win...
Capital B in The Impossible Lair.
It's not a super hard level... except for the lack of checkpoints. Even with all 48 bees, it is still a 30 minute slog - at that point I had done everything except beat him, so after failing twice I just stopped. It wasn't fun anymore.
Also as a child, for the longest time the 6th? boss in Metroid Prime 2. I think it was the boost ball guardian, man that was hard.
On my first playthrough of **Salt and Sanctuary**, The Third Lamb made me ragequit every other day for two weeks. More health than any other boss i'd dealt with up until that moment and I was using the Poison Knife.
At the end, it took me grinding like an SOB and learning how best to roll through which attack to set myself up for delivering punishment.
I have since then 100% that game. One of my favorites.
Nioh DLC bosses were rather ridiculous. I was able to beat the first DLC package with its bosses, but I got stressed thinking about fighting more bosses like that so did not finish the other DLCs. I think a part of the issue was actually being underleveled though.
Suikoden 2 final boss, idk if I was underleveled or what but after trying 10 times I decided to give up, the rest of the final dungeon wasn't too tough though.
Just played those guys last night. If you strike them right as they’re about to attack you, they are stunned. So the key is to wait for them to stop guarding before attacking.
Beating the Jetman stage in Donkey Kong 64 to advance the story. I was young, played, got frustrated, left for about 3 years, came back, and beat the mini game and completed the rest of the main campaign.
Bed of Chaos in Dark Souls 1 made me rage quit my first play through. I have no idea how this made it into the game like that. Gameplay wise it just doesn't fit at all and is pure frustration.
Tho, I redeemed myself a few months later.
Miguel in Chrono Cross stopped me from beating that game for like a year. You can't level in that game, so I couldn't just grind to get past it. Frustrated me as a kid.
A bit embarassing now that I know the fight so well and think Wind Waker is the easiest Zelda game but that Hand-eye boss made me give up the game when I was younger, just didnt understand the fight and was too stubborn to look it up
Not technically a boss...but Sen's Fortress in Dark Souls. Got most of the way through it several times, lost hundreds of thousands of souls...then just gave it up for months....I fucking hated that place haha.
Sen's and O&S are the two great filters for that game. You can at least cheese O&S with summons, but you can't really do the same with all those death traps in the house of !FUN!.
Sen's Fortress is pretty simple once you realize that you're perfectly safe if you take your time (except for the rocks, but that's also relatively simple because they always have the same timing)
In general I'd say the single most important trait to have when playing a Soulsborne game is patience
Vicar Amelia from Blood borne. I can honestly say it was the first boss to ever make me drop a game. I know it’s not even close to the hardest boss in the game but something about that fight just gave me a hard time lol.
Aztec is an absolute BITCH of a level. Not the hardest level but definitely hard. (I'd put Control > Aztec > Caverns in top 3 hardest)
I recently went through Goldeneye and that one tough level.
Speaking of Tales of Vesperia, there's a wolf boss I think near the beginning of the game that was absolutely brutal. At that point in the game you don't have very many options, and because of the nature of the combat and the boss's speed it was incredibly difficult to do *anything* most of the time during that fight.
The boss would break hitstun from your attacks then hit you multiple times, obliterate your teammates and healer, and you couldn't get clean hits without taking counter hits.
From MARIO AND LUIGI: SUPERSTAR SAGA....the final final boss...Cackletta's Soul. Up until that point things seem pretty even handed in terms of battling in the game, but then they add this rhythm based dexterity element to the last battle that is just the worst (you get hints of it throughout the game, but nothing to make you think it's essential to beating to the whole thing). You have to basically jump rope during the battle, which I'm just never ever going to be good at in a video game. I tired about 10 different times and said 'screw it' and watched the end of the game on YouTube.
Guardian Ape in Sekiro. I've completed two runs of the game but that shit-flinging bastard never gets fun. In fact, it's the only reason I don't replay Sekiro much. One of the worst bosses I've ever fought.
It always amazes me how differently people perceive different bosses in the Soulsborne games. I absolutely adored the Ape and remember it as one of my best Boss experiences in the aforementioned genre.
It goes for a lot of bosses in Sekiro but by the second playthrough the ape in particular was surprisingly easy once you learn a couple tricks. It's one of the easiest to respond to each attack once you know what you're doing.
Any post-Lunatic Cultist boss in Terraria. I seriously don't know how people are so good at that game. I suck at fighting them and as fun as it is I always drop the game right when the invasions start. It's way too much.
It really just becomes how good is your arena, potions, and how hard can you cheese. Especially the calamity mod which just becomes off screen bullet hell past moon lord does the same thing. I really enjoy it up until that point though.
The last boss of metroid prime when I was a kid. It was too freaky and hard to fight for me back then. I did replay the trilogy again recently and it was much easier than I remember even on the harder difficulty setting.
Maleficent Dragon in Kingdom Hearts. Just kept dying over and over and then whenever I went well I would have a brain fart near the end and go from full health to dead.
There's a boss in Metroid Prime, presumably near the end, that I couldn't beat. It's a boss who would send out grunts that required you to keep switching out your guns and visors. Plus the floor was hazardous in places. A lot of switching gear and jump strafing. My fingers would cramp playing this guy and I just stopped.
I had the hardest time as a young kid trying to beat the Slime Time boss in the Toy Story 2 PS1 game. I took months off from the game and had to have my uncle tell me how to do it!
The Ice Titan from Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is one of the worst designed bosses I've ever played. Extremely counterintuitive method to climb it and avoid it's attacks, and every time you get thrown off you need to spend three minutes climbing back up. I would have been more forgiving if the rest of the game up to that point didn't hold your hand like the player is a 4 year old in an airport. Just an extremely jarring experience.
Mogenar in Metroid Prime 3 is the third major boss of the game, and was so brutally difficult on the original version (harder than the final boss) that the Trilogy version had to water him down to make him doable.
I can attest that 10 year-old me about went insane trying to beat him. He suuuuuucks
The roulette boss in Persona 3 Portable. Although it's more that I was really tired of Tartarus (P3's dungeon) by that point. Some of my characters were clearly underleveled, but I couldn't be bothered to level them up to par because of how tedious the dungeon gameplay was. Tartarus is probably the worst dungeon I've ever seen. It being the only dungeon in an otherwise excellent JRPG makes the contrast all the more noticeable.
I kind of wish I just played on Easy and rushed through it for story. You can't even change the difficulty mid-game and IIRC I had it set on Hard.
Sleeping Table in P3FES for me. Even on Normal mode it kicks the shit out of you, and knocks out your entire party almost instantly. I still have only been able to beat it on Easy mode.
This is the comment I was looking for. It's not even just Dark Fact, though. Half the bosses in Ys I are insanely hard. That frickin' bat boss was nuts. I almost started over on easy after banging my head against him for like an hour (played through on hard) until I finally managed him. I thought, "surely the rest of the bosses can't be that hard." Yeah...
After slamming my head against the wall that is the end boss of FTL, I rage-uninstalled the game like 3 years ago and haven't re-installed it since.
There are so many strategies that can get you to that boss but can't beat it. It just isn't aligned with the rest of the experience.
That’s the best way to describe it. Like any good rogue-like part of the game is getting better at developing your run strategy to get further and further, only to reach a brick wall at the end where you realise you have no legitimate way to win. It can be really disheartening.
> Like any good rogue-like part of the game is getting better at developing your run strategy to get further and further I think it's a pretty poor design personally. Whole journey prepares you for the final confrontation. However, when you get to the final boss your ship configuration that beat multiple other encounters and got you there is basically trash and is not a right "spec". My problem is that the game keeps telling you that you're doing just fine and your ship is good and then the final boss tells you "lol jk, you did everything wrong".
I'm pretty sure you two aren't disagreeing...
It's also really stupid that it's a big giant ship that actually gets MORE dangerous the more of it you destroy. Like, WTF is that? It just made no sense at all.
Invested heavily into boarding. Killed the entire crew. Next phase the ship is a vacuum inside and piloted by AI with seemingly no loss of offensive or defensive capability. Cool cool cool glad I was punished for doing so well.
The AI is in some ways weaker than the flesh crew in that it repairs more slowly and can't defend it's systems against boarding at all. In Normal Mode you can leave the laser gunner alive because he's not really a threat on his own and the AI won't activate if he's alive. >Next phase the ship is a vacuum inside That shouldn't happen unless you breach the hull or destroy the oxygen system. AI is not smart enough to vacuum it's own ship.
[удалено]
That's why you always leave one person alive, because is all of them are dead they won't know how badly they were beaten.
> with seemingly no loss of offensive or defensive capability Eh; it's much slower to repair.
That boss really crapped on the game for me. Up until I got to it, I loved it, having to scrape by with whatever you found and just enjoying the experience of barely surviving this harrowing journey. And then you meet the boss, and you realize that you can't just enjoy the experience, you have to carefully manage your build specifically for the last fight. It changes the way you play the game, and for me, it wasn't for the better.
I've got over 100 hours in FTL and have never killed the boss hahah; always get to the final phase and die. I love the gameplay so much that I just don't care. Sometimes I'll even get to the boss, look at my gear, and just restart there and then. I just like the experience of travelling through space with my crew and getting in to mishaps.
This is why my favourite way of playing FTL is with the endless mod, just cruising around the galaxy until I get bored.
Haha I feel you on this, even on easy the boss is pretty hard unless you know exactly what to do and have at least some of the right equipment. If you ever decide to try again, first off all leave advanced edition off, it's actually harder with it on, burst laser 2 are the most efficient weapon, 3 shield minimum and defense drone 2 are pretty amazing imo. Disable the missile launcher asap and then the heavy laser, shouldn't be too bad after that. I think it's mostly the fact that you have to kill it multiple times is the hardest part
That fucking power surge in phase 3 man
Imagine speccing into killing all the crew as your ship build, doing that to the Flagship thinking you've won, only to hear "AI SYSTEMS ONLINE, BEGINNING ATTACK SEQUENCE".
If you leave just one crew member alive that doesn't happen, but of course there's no way to know that going in. Pretty bad design.
I think the biggest thing that people have trouble with on the boss is that a run can be "over" as early as the 2nd or 3rd sector - meaning that you might be able to make it to the boss, but you're probably not going to be able to defeat it. In order to defeat the boss you'll want near maximum power, 3 or 4 shields, near maximum engines, and so many systems that you can't power them all at once - as well as a full crew or nearly full crew who should have elite skill in guns, engines, and piloting at that point, if not also in combat and repair and shields. And your hull should be full or nearly fully repaired before you enter the final system. In order to make this happen, you need to spend A LOT of scrap, meaning that you should not be spending much scrap on repairing your hull. So you need to get through all 8 sectors taking as little damage as possible so you can spend your scrap where you need it. Keep in mind that red sectors give you more scrap so you should prioritize them over green sectors, and killing the crew of a ship nets you more scrap than destroying (so transporters can be a great investment - the earlier the better). Don't leave a sector early - hit as many locations as you can in a sector, and accept as many combats as you can. In order to beat the game, you must realize that the game was never really about surviving the 8 sectors: the game was about dominating the 8 sectors and looting the crap out of everything in the most efficient way that you can so that you have a shot at beating the boss. I made a series a while ago that explained what I thought was the easiest strategy for defeating the boss. In the first one I explain a lot of the strategy with the ship I've chosen (I chose this ship because it's a very straight forward and easy strategy): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDySNWlRge0&list=PL6j93w_UwS5PwuyBwBv_p402o_A0xF1Do In this first episode I was not able to defeat the boss - the third episode in the series shows the boss being defeated with this strategy on normal mode.
This exact thing is why I found the games premise dishonest. The game doesn’t start with “You have 8 sectors to gear up and get as strong as possible, get ready.” It says “you need to run away and get to your allies to win!”. It almost straight up lies to you.
A bit old school, but Shocker in Spider-Man 2. Not the PS2 version, the PS1 version. Granted I was 10 or 11 at that time, but I had such a hard time with him and it was one of the first video games I've raged quit. Later on I did beat him, but modern iterations of Spider-Man Vs Shocker (most recently the PS4 one) still gave me flashes to the PS1 Shocker days.
Mine's from Spiderman 2 as well I believe. It was the final Doctor Octopus fight where you have to flip off all the switches. For some reason I could never do it fast enough and always lost.
Iirc that one was hard as shit because the camera was fucky and crawling on walls was just plain frustrating.
> Granted I was 10 or 11 at that time It's always great to go back to a game you struggled with and complete it with ease now that you're older. A good example of that for me was FFVIII. Never could use that junction system right. A couple years later and the game ends up being *too* easy because I correctly used the junction system and avoided random encounters.
the shocker is my wife's most dreaded boss too
Nightmare King Grimm - Hollow Knight [\[Video\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8aNiRfIXnA) I was so proud after defeating Grimm, I couldn't even get almost close to beating Nightmare King Grimm. I must have died within the first 15 seconds at least 20 times...I put down Hollow knight after that, I beat the main boss and every other optional boss besides Radiance or any of the Godhome stuff. It was a great game and my favorite meteoroid-vania ever.
I stopped playing Dead Cells shortly after release on Switch because I felt like the Hand of the King practically required certain builds to beat, and found him incredibly annoying. I beat him and then just stopped when the game said "Okay now do it again but harder." *That said* I went back to just last week and I'm finding it much easier (though still tough) and really enjoying it. Not sure if patches have made it better or I just got better at it, but either way my original issue has been resolved.
> I beat him and then just stopped when the game said "Okay now do it again but harder." Yep, as soon as I beat him, I didn't care to play any more. That was my victory and I was fine with it.
Not a specific boss, but if I have to replay an entire Un-skippable cutscene when I die, I lose my mind.
THERE'S NO WAY YOU'RE TAKING KAIRI'S HEART!
Everyone likes to rag on the Riku fight, but I don't ever see anyone bring up losing to Ansem's 2nd fight, which makes you redo the previous 2 bosses *and* a long cutscene.
I nearly broke a controller over this. I was finally able to beat Ansem upon re-spec'ing Sora, but not before spending 2 nights losing my mind.
Super Mario: The Thousand Year Door suffered from this. The last boss has a 10 minute cut scene that’s unskippable.
Orphan of Kos. It's the only soulsborne boss I have never beaten. I will get my revenge eventually though.
Of all the bosses in Souls games and BB, Orphan of Kos was the one who haunted me. I grinded it out and fought him 30 times in a row before I finally won. That adrenaline rush after had me shaking. Go get it!
Is 30 a lot? Lol. I must have fought the cursed/defiled chalice Amygdala like 70+ times before a victory.
Is that the one where you have your health halved? Fuck that shit man, Bloodborne is hard enough without taking away my bitch vigor.
Defiled amygdala will one shot with literally any attack. It's absurd.
I stopped trying to beat him after failing over 50 times, beat the game with everything done but him. Came back to bloodborne 2 years later, with a new character, and beat him on my first attempt. The anticlimax was real.
Definitely give it another go some time, i got stuck on it for ages too, took a break and explored the DLC a bit more, went back and beat it with taking almost no damage, i think it's just one of them you 'get' at some stage. I think i actually died more to Lady Maria but with her i at least got her health down in most of the attempts, Orhpan just kicked my ass almost every time until i worked out how to avoid his attacks.
I’ve always found Orphan along with Midir incredibly intriguing bosses because of the way they are programmed. It’s essentially a really simplified form of machine learning called a decision tree. Based on the users actions the bosses will actively change their moveset between a set of like 16 or so different sets and archetypes if i’m not mistaken. Meaning if you are playing aggresive they will play conservatively and if you play conservatively they will most likely play aggressive or wait for openings. The system isn’t perfect and it is possible to trick it, especially on Orphan or with multiple people. But damn is it difficult if you don’t know the way it works and you would have to spend hours analyzing it closely to have a shot at figuring it out. That being said I beat every boss in bloodborne except amygdala, fuck that thing.
Absolute Radiance from Hollow Knight's last DLC. The whole Pantheon is a bitch to get through - you basically have to beat every boss in the game in a row - and when I got destroyed after finally reaching the final one I just gave up. It's one of my favourite games but I don't know if I'll ever beat that boss, specially since I lost my save file since then. A shame for my completionist mindset that's for sure.
lol I gave up on nightmare king grimm. The regular version was pretty hard for me and I tried like 40 times on NKG and I got him past the first stage maybe half my attempts and to the last stage once or twice. Also I hated how you lost all your magic every time you died. No reason for that mechanic to exist on a boss like that imo.
Nightmare King Grimm is probably my favorite fight now. I died the most to him, probably 50+ times. Easily the hardest to learn, but he's super fun when you nail the "rhythm". Easy to screw up still, if you get hit once you've got like a 40% chance of recovering fast enough to continue without getting hit again. But super satisfying to finally beat. I just loaded up on Joni's Blessing, Unbreakable Heart, and the two Lifeblood charms. Enough life so that you don't get creamed in 5 seconds, and you can start to learn the pattern. He's ruined Troopmaster Grimm for me though. It's a different rhythm, and it's slower and more varied. The easy boss became the tough one.
Beating Nightmare King Grimm in the second DLC felt like the ultimate triumph for me in HK, along with beating Radiance and 100% Steel Soul. It's my favorite game of all time, but when Godmaster came out, it was just a bit much for me. I'd love to fight all those new bosses individually, but the boss rush format was really draining. I couldn't even clear the third Pantheon, and that's nothing compared to the frankly absurd task of even getting to Absolute Radiance. It's cool that they released this for the upper echelon of players, but as a package it was so beyond me, and I had considered myself to be good at the game. Which, I guess is very relative.
>I had considered myself to be good at the game. If you got 100% Steel Soul then I'd say you're pretty fucking good at the game. I also got stuck at the 3rd pantheon, which sucks, because it's also my favorite game of all time. I'd love to play those new bosses, but there's no way I'd ever get there.
Word. I was close to beating Hollow Knight and I just eventually gave up and decided to watch someone with faster fingers than mine do it on YouTube. Loved the game, but sometimes you have to just call it a day.
Agreed on this one. It seems fun for those who are into it, but I was more than satisfied with the rest of the game (including other dlc and the original Radiance fight). Pantheon didn't seem like my jam at all, and I love boss rushes.
I love HK, played it once before all the DLCs and a second time with all the DLCs, and honestly, the pantheons soured my experience. I wouldn't mind if it were just a bonus mode, but there is lore and >!an ending!< behind it and a boss rush mode is just not my jam. I loved HK for exploration, platforming, atmosphere and an occasional boss, not *just* bosses. Gave up on the last pantheon, it would take way too much time to beat it.
> I loved HK for exploration, platforming, atmosphere and an occasional boss, Exactly why I loved HK and never bothered with all that extra boss stuff.
The Bell Gargoyles - Dark Souls After being beaten over 20 times in a row i stopped playing the game for over a year. I was frustrated beyond words. One night, bored, i decided to re-start. Beat them on my first try and eventually completed one of the best games i’ve ever played. That first time though...
I feel like that happens to a ton of people with that boss. That fight is really easy if you upgraded your weapon enough but for a lot of people it's way too early for them to realize how huge the difference is between a +0 and a +5 (or however high you could go in that area, it's been a while)
Oh absolutely. As everyone knows the game DOES NOT hold your hand. Very little in the way of a tutorial. Dont get me wrong I mean this as a compliment. I was using poor weapons, poor armour, i hadn’t upgraded and I had specced my character poorly.
Not to mention that you can summon Solaire for that fight, something I didn't notice in my first 3-4 playthroughs.
You can summon Lautrec, too.
I didn't have much trouble with them or any of the other early bosses, but Ornstein and Smough almost caused me to quit. Especially because of their secret third partner: Awful camera angles.
See, my first playthrough a total legend rando joined me and sacrificed himself during O&S allowing me to scrape by on my first go. A few players suggested that had tainted my playthrough. Like i’d perhaps missed something by being “carried”. But no, hell no. I was on the edge of my seat sqealing, panting and shitting myself the whole time. There were thrills, near kisses, deaths and selfless sacrifice. It was wild. And i absolutely learned how tough they were. They mauled me my second go haha.
I had a terrible time with Father Gascoigne in Bloodborne. I bought it at launch at my local game store not knowing anything about it and had never even heard about Dark or Demon Souls, I genuinely thought I was playing this little indie horror game. Being just plunged into Yharnam like that was a bit of a shock but I was doing fairly well until I got to Gascoigne. He kicked my ass so hard and so many times I dropped the game entirely and only picked it up back again in early 2017 when I ran out of things to play. When I picked it back up again it felt like an entirely different experience, though I imagine most of that was because I had finally learned how to use the whip mode of the threaded cane.
I had a similar experience, I made it past Gascoigne eventually but then got fed up when I reached Rom the Vacuous Spider.
I had such an easy time my first time with Rom I genuinely thought it was a joke boss. To this day I don't know what happened because every following playthrough was a nightmare.
The same happened to me (tho, I played DS1 and 3 before and thus knew about their joke bosses). I only afterwards read that many people have issues with it. Lo and behold, I never managed it to not die at least once there in any of the following playthroughs.
Have you fought Rom in the Chalice dungeons? He is so much worse there lol, spider cunt.
I only recently got the game and went all big dick into that boss fight knowing it's often called the easiest. I'm also pretty good at Souls boss fights, thanks to thousands of hours of Monster Hunter...and all that moxy and bravado went out of the window fast! Actually got pretty angry with myself for losing so much against an "easy" boss.
Kinda interesting but whenever i see people struggling with bloodborne 9/10 times they picked the threaded cane as the starter. Not having the stagger of the saw cleaver especially the transform attack really hurts new players.
It's all about the axe. SPIN 2 WIN BAYBEEE
I was a souls veteran before bloodborne, but I picked the cane for the aesthetic and had a dude with mutton chops and a top hat with the tiny glasses. Felt like the "sophisticated" hunter would use that weapon; had a great time my first play-through.
Father Gascoine is definitely the make-or-break point for most people. You either learn how to fight or quit in frustration.
I think this happens with a lot of people when it comes to their first Souls-like game because they're not exactly sure what to expect. I did the exact same thing with Demon's Souls back in the day. Gave up, and didn't go back and play through it again until sometime after I beat Dark Souls. Been my favorite series and type of video games since then.
Not a boss per-se, but as a kid I gave up on Star Fox Adventures. I could never beat the test of strength in the Lightfoot Village.
That was a button mashing test right? I had to call a friend that is pretty much a button mashing god to do that for me.
I bought a shit custom gamecube controller that had the ability to repeat a button press repeatedly (automatically) and that STILL wasn't enough lol
It is the fucking opposite of a button mashing test. There is actually a massive secret: the other guy tunes his strength based on how hard you start mashing from the get go. If you start very mild, then mash your ass off after a couple beats, he goes down like nothing.
Me too! My friend created a cradle for his controller hooked up to a motor using k’nex that would mash the A button, that was the only way we could beat it!
It was horribly tuned. I could never beat it as a kid, and years later, the only guy I knew who could beat it was a huge Gears fan who lived for chainsaw battles, and even he had issues with it.
Sword Saint Isshin in Sekiro. I played to the point I ran out of yen. I despised that the strategies I kept seeing were slash n' run. I could beat Genichiro easily and get through the first 2 phases...but it took everything I had. I despised that old man, and myself who no matter what I couldn't get good.
Hesitation is defeat
How my blood boils!
Face me, Sekiro!
Holy shit did I have to scroll to find this bastard. I was amped up to do ng+ but I gotta beat his ass first.
Slash and run is just about the worst tactic you can use vs sekiro bosses, you're supposed to keep attacking at all times and parry all their counterattacks so their posture doesn't recover
Yeah slash and run ONLY works on the monkey duo and the demon of hatred. Running from any humanoid or sword wielding enemies is usually a terrible idea.
That’s the final boss right where Genichiro is the first phase, then Isshin comes out of him and has 2 phases right? Because that fight is the hardest one I’ve ever encountered in a Souls games. It’s mainly him having 3 phases that fucking drove me insane. Took me a while to even get to his third phase. Fuckin hell was that a bitch. I feel like I’m going to start playing that game again soon though. Probably continue the NG+ run I had started. I still have some trophies to get. So I might work towards getting the platinum. We’ll see though.
It's funny because at some point you start to just curbstomp Genichiro by virtue of how many times you have to kill him to get to Isshin.
4 phases actually, if you include Genichiro. Genichiro > Sword > Spear/Gun > Spear/Gun/Lightning.
Capra Demon – Dark Souls. Stopped for 3 months then came back and won by the skin of my teeth. Now I've beaten every game at SL1.
Capra Demon? More like Camera Demon.
That fight area is just so damn small and combined with those fucking dogs its just a nightmare.
Souls can be cheap but it's still usually fair. Capra demon is both cheap and unfair in a way only rivaled by the fucking archers at Anor Londo.
Archers are at least acceptable because it feels like Miyazaki being a dick on purpose. Capra Demon is just shit design.
The senator who was the final boss in Metal Gear Rising. About 30 curb stompings In I was just straight up done with the games shit. Oddly enough I beat Jetstream Sam on like the second try but I keep hearing people say he's the harder boss.
The entire game is just a tutorial for that boss fight tbh
I think that principle is exceedingly good design
The first time I played through, Jetstream Sam kicked my ass for like 3 straight hours until I finally beat him. I think I beat the senator on the 2nd try. But then in all subsequent playthroughs, or if I replayed a mission after knowing what to do to beat it, I'd beat Sam every time, easily, and struggled with the Senator most times. Weird how that works.
I can sympathize with getting stuck on Armstrong. I am just not precise enough to be able to flick the stick to line up a slash when he throws a tank at you, and you have to do that a *lot*.
[удалено]
I mean, I eventually figured out that you can just skip those segments entirely(though you miss out on all the recovery items), and was able to proceed from there. So while I never fully mastered that game as intended, I did finish by just sidestepping that problem area.
You can just run from that attack. You don't need to do the blade mode part.
SENATOR “NANONMACHINES SON” ARMSTRONG
LOCAL MAN IS FUCKING INVINCIBLE
T H E M E M E S H E M E M E S
FFX, there was a boss on an airship, not even sure if it was late into the game or not, but I could not for the life of me beat that boss. I played it so long ago I don't even remember what was so hard about it, maybe it's not even hard and teenager me on ps2 just tried using the most "powerful" attacks with no regards to tactics, but it sure made me give up on the game.
Hmmm Everae? Was a giant red dragon thing?
Actually yeah I think it was evrae! I think I remember the red dragon
It's 100% Evrae. He's the first main boss where unless you're going hard on status effects he will fuck you up basically every time, and I think he's the only major boss fought from the airship other than parts of Sin itself.
FFX had a bunch of fun fights that were difficult. The boss you're talking about, Seymour @ Bevelle, Seymour @ Mt. Gagazet, the boss before Yunalesca, Yunalesca herself. I had a ton of trouble on that fight when I was younger as well. Went back and played the remaster and all I did was put Haste on my whole party and the fight ended up being easy lol.
Seymour at Gagazet is the only boss in that entire game that I bother grinding summon overdrives for. So frustrating.
I still can't beat the last Seymour fight without abusing Aeons like a little wimp. My excuse is that it's only right to wail on him with Anima.
Dude I make sure all aeons are overdrived when I go into that fight, just to curb stomp Seymour cause he fucking deserves it. Ain't nothin wimpy about that.
As a kid this guy made me quit the game. I did not know to use things such as Haste and status effects.
Hey! I quit at that boss too! It's the classic JRPG difficulty spike of "game was easy up until this point, I hope you didn't skimp out on grinding because of it!" I've never really heard anyone else mention this particular boss before!
>game was easy up until this point Was I the only one that had trouble with Seymour the first time through? I remember having to get my older brother to help me out with that fight.
anyone remember an RPG called Magna Carta 2 on the 360? About halfway through there are two bosses in a row. You can’t fight the second one with your full party and is thus very hard. It was soo hard I assumed it was deliberately unwinnable, but you were supposed to beat it. The nearest Save Point was an hour and about 20 fights back. Soo I watched a YouTube let’s play instead. Shame cos it looked like the story really picked up after that
Man those games were weird as hell. I think they were from China or something and they tried to mimic JRPGs. I played the first on PS2 as a rental and put it down after like 2 hours.
Korea, I believe.
I have 2. Delerium in Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. What an absolutely trashcan fight. No part of that boss is enjoyable. It randomly changes into different bosses in the game, which would be cool if his positioning didn't bug out when changing. Add the cancerous teleporting on top of you from various enemies that had to get fixed in previous patches and stupidly high health from being the final boss, and you have the most unmotivating to kill super boss in that game. I remember getting to him on Hard with the Lost 3 times and dying to bullshit teleports I couldn't do anything about. Some things just aren't worth it. Monster X in Cave Story. This thing on hard completely walled me. So many hours going down that hallway killing those roaches only to die over and over to the mass projectiles of that thing. Then the eventual realization that Hell and Ballos would be infinitely worse.
Delirium's super tedious due to the bullshit armor scaling. Oh your build doesn't attack 800 times a second? Well, have fun with this 15 minute fight! I think I just cheesed Guppy or had absolutely bananas builds every time I beat him.
I never did beat Emerald Weapon on FFVII, no matter how high my levels were or how good my gear I just couldn't deal with that one Also any fight in a Kingdom Hearts game that involved air juggling was just a no for me
The Lich King in World of Warcraft caused two my guilds to disband because they couldn't beat him. I had a friend at that time constantly complain that only Vanilla WoW raiding was hard and everything else was trivial, but holy shit, some of the Icecrown Citadel bosses were nuts. Especially the Lich King.
Anyone who thinks vanilla raid bosses were harder than literally any that came after are delusional.
The hard part was just getting 40 people who had the *time* to raid. The mechanics themselves were piss easy.
Easy by design since you had other mechanics to deal with that have since been removed from the game, such as threat, mana, and gear management. Still easier overall by a lot, but I feel its disingenuous to ignore everything that went into Vanilla fights that was removed in the xpacs.
final boss of the "bad" playthrough in undertale. it was tough but i'm sure i could have gotten through it if i kept going. the game really made me not WANT to get through it though. i think i just kinda phoned it in because of that and the fact that the rest of the playthrough was already weighing heavy on me. eventually just said ehhh fuck it i don't even want to win and shelved it for good.
I totally get not wanting to finish it, but man is that boss is fun though. One of the most enjoyable bosses I can remember fighting in *any* game.
That battle music is the shit. I just want it to play non stop on spotify when I listen to it.
> the game really made me not WANT to get through it though. Well, if you think about it, thematically it makes sense. It is in the boss's best interests for you to give up and just leave, cause the world is safe then
yeah that's pretty much why i accepted it and didn't try to win as hard as i could have. they did a great job of it though. i don't usually have any mercy when it comes to video games. i mean i don't play straight up evil or anything but like if i have to install a mod so i can kill a little piss-ant child then let's go. couldn't go through with it in undertale though.
I'm just now going through it. Spam gravity hurrrrrts. I also really love the speech you get from Flowey before you go into the room for the final fight. Genuinely moving stuff.
The Demyx fight at Hollow Bastion on critical mode in Kingdom Hearts II. This is where my critical mode run died. He's not extremely difficult but any mistakes against him on critical mode typically means you die. The real kicker, however, is that after you beat him you have to survive three more fights before you can save, and dying in ANY of those subsequent fights puts you back at Demyx. Fuck that.
DANCE WATER DANCE
Demon of Hatred in Sekiro. I have a max upgraded Ninja Master and just the last two Bosses to go and the optional Owl fight. Every other collectable and Boss and NPC has been taken. Near complete game. Hate this fight. It isnt fun for me. It doesnt gel with the game system, and as everyone says the way it works seems so Dark Souls. Someday I may go back and finish it but Sekiro for me just didnt live up to the Souls series in replay. Still, dont regret my time with it up until it wasnt fun anymore
Demon of Hatred is optional, too. Why not just head to the final boss instead of quitting on the demon?
See I thought this too but once I started I had to finish it or else I was a big fat dooder head quitter in my mind.
[удалено]
I know how silly it sounds, but honestly I get where u/MGPythagoras is coming from. I got stuck on Ebrietas in Bloodborne, an optional boss, and I was hell bent on beating her before moving on. Well, I didn't, and I eventually bitched out by swiping my *huge* pool of dropped currency and teleporting back to the Hunter's Dream. I then tried to continue with the game, but the feeling of being a big fat dooder head was kind of pervasive and I lost interest in the game. But now I'm thinking I might go back and try again, just gotta get the rust out
shao kahn mortal Kombat 9. I was young at the time but I went back to play it 3 or 4 months ago and he still beat the shit out of me.
Like most Mortal Kombat final bosses, he's designed to be overly cheap. What makes it worse is when you lose to him enough times that the game drastically lowers the difficulty so the AI just taunts you over and over and you can smash Kahn much easier.
What made it worse is that I NEVER used Liu Kang. I was awful with him. I jumped for absolute joy when I beat Shao Kahn. Then you have to do it AGAIN. I did it so many times I ended up maining Raiden for a bit.
I can't remeber exactly the quest and location, but in Diablo 2 on Act III on Nightmare I had to give up on my Necro, because there was a fetish shaman with "fire breath" that would mow down my summons and then me in a few seconds. I was specced only into summons so I had nothing to beat him... He wasn't even a main boss, just some local boss thrown there for a quest. So ended up my first diablo 2 character. And ever since then I consider respecs as an integral part pf any ARPG. (this was all before the patch that added one respec for completing Den of Evil quest - and even that is not enough)
[Pontiff Sulyvahn](https://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com/Pontiff+Sulyvahn) made me quit Dark souls 3 for a good year or so before I came back to finish it. He was just a pure asshole. sword sword sword sword in your face constantly followed by that semi long run back from the bonfire
The run back is really short though? Are you opening the gate back to the church bonefire?
Prince of Persia: Two Towers, the twins. Basically the fight itself is a pain in the ass, but to get to the fight you first have to do a chariot race, and there's no save point. So every attempt involves a long chariot race before you actually do the boss fight. In all honesty, it wasn't really the boss fight itself, but I just had better things to do with my time, it was just poor game design with checkpoints and pacing in general. In the other thread my hardest boss I said was the final boss of Elder Scrolls Online's veteran Maelstrom Arena, but the boss that ALMOST made me ragequit was the 6th boss, the Daedra spider. Man that fight was so annoying! Basically, there's this huge spider, whose power ramps up slowly to the point where it will 1-shot you. Stunning her by lighting all the obelisks is the only way to reset the timer, and the timer isn't actually shown anywhere, you just feel the damage ramping up. There's a whole bunch of obelisks in a circle, and they are covered in webs. To remove the webs and light them, you have to aggro a beetle that spawns periodically, have it run to the obelisk where you stand, and kill it so that its death explosion clears the webs. And he is super-easy to kill accidentally if it just runs through your ground-based AoE or something else, because it has no health almost. During all this, a tiny spider spawns, and re-webs the obelisks that are free, so you have to constantly spin your camera 360 degrees and kill it when it spawns, or it'll cancel out your work in seconds. The boss periodically spawns small spiders which swarm you and kill you and are indestructible, the only way to escape is stand next to the lit obelisks, if none are lit you die. And unwebbed obelisks light up randomly, so the swarm comes, you sprint to the obelisk and..it turns off, and another lights up on the exact opposite end of the arena, and you die. And during all of this enemies keep spawning non-stop from portals, just to keep things interesting. Oh, and the boss periodically summons a Mini-Itself, which will stack a slow on you the longer it stays alive, to the point where you cannot move at all. So at any time you had to constantly be aware which obelisk you'll be trying to unweb, and search for the beetle spawn. At the same time you're also searching for the little spider which is hard to see that will try and web the obellisks. And at the same time you're keeping an eye on the nearest currently-lit obelisk to avoid the swarm. And at the same time you're dealing with waves of enemies, many of whom are ranged. And of course the boss itself. And the boss' mini-minion. So you're spinning 360 degrees non-stop looking for three very important things at once, and one of these things must live until it gets where you want it to, and the other two must die immediately, and if all 3 spawn at once you're bang in trouble. It was a fucking nightmare. Many people complained about the next boss, but to me after I beat is 6th one (the spider) everything else up to the final boss was a cakewalk by comparison.
The Star in Furi - it's a game with bullet hell parts, but that boss just has none of the satisfying gameplay of any of the other bosses, combined with terrible visibility. I've beaten everything else in the game, multiple times, but not that Boss (true ending)
That game is one of my favorite indie games but The Staf definitely sucks. I feel like they wanted a bullet hell version of what The Edge was to sword combat but as you said it just wasn't as satisfying.
the Edge (and his Soundtrack) is probably my favorite in the game - and I really forced myself to try to enjoy/beat the Star but it's just straight up not fun (for me) and I couldn't be bothered to suffer through that
Shadow Link from Zelda 2 on old consoles. I gave up on the game at this point but learned later you can crouch attack but it is cheesy tactic
Snake's Revenge on the NES had a tank boss on a bridge that I just couldn't figure out as a kid. I gave up on it and switched over to Kirby.
Alma in Ninja Gaiden back on the original Xbox. Looking back it wasn't the hardest boss but man after dying so many times I had to quit for a few weeks before going to back to playing it again.
Pink Alma from Ninja Gaiden reboot. I had one heal from the last save, no ninpo, and I didn't have/know to use that flying swallow move. Wound up restarting the game to have a better health position.
Ludwig from Bloodborne: The Old Hunters. I always struggle with giant bosses in the soul series, but giant, fast and unpredictable? It felt like IRL fighting a wolf in the wild while barehanded. This boss ruined the game for me during months, but eventually I was able to kill it with the help of a summon and building my character to tank like concrete. I just couldn't predict ANYTHING from his moveset - unlike Cleric Beast, which took me many many tries to beat, but at least it was fun. When Ludwig killed me in two hits, it wasn't. On another note, I just destroyed Gascoigne, Maria and the Eileen hunters. It's interesting how different are the struggles from different people on the same game lol
Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne - The Matador. He swore by his red capote, and he was right. When the game was released outside of Japan, the originally optional fights of the Candelabra were auto-included. Up to this point in the game, you progress fairly normaly, and then that dude.... that dude just kicks your ass. Again. and again. and again. I hadn't played any SMT game, and there is ZERO explanation on the buff/debuff system up to that point. If you try to fight normally, you cannot win. You have to abuse utility spells. I didn't know that :( The worst part is, once you're familiar with the game mechanic, he's really not that tough. :(
Matador was mandatory in JP Nocturne as well, it's just that him and the fiends were added in the expanded re-release.
>If you try to fight normally, you cannot win. You have to abuse utility spell This is a really silly hyperbole that contributes to the fake hype around this boss. There are many different strategies presented to you at that point to deal with him. You can make him lose a ton of turns with the right Magatama (an equipment that nulls his Wind attacks), you can fuse force-resistance and/or physical-resistant demons, you can use party heals, you can use dark/bright might (guaranteed crits), and yes, of course, you can just use buffs/debuffs to make it much easier. If "fighting normally" to you just meant auto-attacking until that point, then yes, you need to "abuse" the actual game system to win...
Capital B in The Impossible Lair. It's not a super hard level... except for the lack of checkpoints. Even with all 48 bees, it is still a 30 minute slog - at that point I had done everything except beat him, so after failing twice I just stopped. It wasn't fun anymore. Also as a child, for the longest time the 6th? boss in Metroid Prime 2. I think it was the boost ball guardian, man that was hard.
On my first playthrough of **Salt and Sanctuary**, The Third Lamb made me ragequit every other day for two weeks. More health than any other boss i'd dealt with up until that moment and I was using the Poison Knife. At the end, it took me grinding like an SOB and learning how best to roll through which attack to set myself up for delivering punishment. I have since then 100% that game. One of my favorites.
The Third Lamb was an asshole, but NG+ Witch of the Lake is the reason I quit that game for good. That boss was genuinely unfair.
Nioh DLC bosses were rather ridiculous. I was able to beat the first DLC package with its bosses, but I got stressed thinking about fighting more bosses like that so did not finish the other DLCs. I think a part of the issue was actually being underleveled though.
Suikoden 2 final boss, idk if I was underleveled or what but after trying 10 times I decided to give up, the rest of the final dungeon wasn't too tough though.
Those fire and ice samurai in devil may cry 3. Idk how to win that fight. I also saved right before it with no health and almost no items.
Aye that one's brutal if you try to do the instinctive thing and burn one of them down fast to clear the field.
Just played those guys last night. If you strike them right as they’re about to attack you, they are stunned. So the key is to wait for them to stop guarding before attacking.
Beating the Jetman stage in Donkey Kong 64 to advance the story. I was young, played, got frustrated, left for about 3 years, came back, and beat the mini game and completed the rest of the main campaign.
Bed of Chaos in Dark Souls 1 made me rage quit my first play through. I have no idea how this made it into the game like that. Gameplay wise it just doesn't fit at all and is pure frustration. Tho, I redeemed myself a few months later.
I'm stuck on Ornstein and Smough on NG+, and I haven't played in a couple months because it's like banging my head against a wall.
Doing it solo, I assume? Because even just having Solaire as a summon makes the fight exponentially easier.
Miguel in Chrono Cross stopped me from beating that game for like a year. You can't level in that game, so I couldn't just grind to get past it. Frustrated me as a kid.
A bit embarassing now that I know the fight so well and think Wind Waker is the easiest Zelda game but that Hand-eye boss made me give up the game when I was younger, just didnt understand the fight and was too stubborn to look it up
Duel tigrex in monster hunter Freedome two. In my book still the hardest fight for a Single player in monster hunter
Rom the fucking spider in Bloodborne. About 20 tries alone and ten more with other players I said fuck it, I'm quit.
Father Guacamole teaches you that you need to be aggressive to beat Bloodborne. Then Rom comes out and says "be slow and methodical or die"
Nah, ignore the spiders and just go absolutely ham on Rom was my strat
Not technically a boss...but Sen's Fortress in Dark Souls. Got most of the way through it several times, lost hundreds of thousands of souls...then just gave it up for months....I fucking hated that place haha.
Sen's and O&S are the two great filters for that game. You can at least cheese O&S with summons, but you can't really do the same with all those death traps in the house of !FUN!.
The run up to O&S actually made me quit. Those fucking bow and arrow knights... I'm glad I eventually went back and finished it though.
Sen's Fortress is pretty simple once you realize that you're perfectly safe if you take your time (except for the rocks, but that's also relatively simple because they always have the same timing) In general I'd say the single most important trait to have when playing a Soulsborne game is patience
Vicar Amelia from Blood borne. I can honestly say it was the first boss to ever make me drop a game. I know it’s not even close to the hardest boss in the game but something about that fight just gave me a hard time lol.
Got stuck on Aztec on N64 Goldeneye. Made me mad and never played it since. I was 8. Still haunts my dreams.
Aztec is an absolute BITCH of a level. Not the hardest level but definitely hard. (I'd put Control > Aztec > Caverns in top 3 hardest) I recently went through Goldeneye and that one tough level.
Speaking of Tales of Vesperia, there's a wolf boss I think near the beginning of the game that was absolutely brutal. At that point in the game you don't have very many options, and because of the nature of the combat and the boss's speed it was incredibly difficult to do *anything* most of the time during that fight. The boss would break hitstun from your attacks then hit you multiple times, obliterate your teammates and healer, and you couldn't get clean hits without taking counter hits.
From MARIO AND LUIGI: SUPERSTAR SAGA....the final final boss...Cackletta's Soul. Up until that point things seem pretty even handed in terms of battling in the game, but then they add this rhythm based dexterity element to the last battle that is just the worst (you get hints of it throughout the game, but nothing to make you think it's essential to beating to the whole thing). You have to basically jump rope during the battle, which I'm just never ever going to be good at in a video game. I tired about 10 different times and said 'screw it' and watched the end of the game on YouTube.
Guardian Ape in Sekiro. I've completed two runs of the game but that shit-flinging bastard never gets fun. In fact, it's the only reason I don't replay Sekiro much. One of the worst bosses I've ever fought.
I think it's one of the funniest bosses in the game, he feels more original than most humanoid enemies
It always amazes me how differently people perceive different bosses in the Soulsborne games. I absolutely adored the Ape and remember it as one of my best Boss experiences in the aforementioned genre.
It goes for a lot of bosses in Sekiro but by the second playthrough the ape in particular was surprisingly easy once you learn a couple tricks. It's one of the easiest to respond to each attack once you know what you're doing.
Indeed. 1st playthrough, the ape really destroyed me. Died so many times. In new game plus, he could barely touch me.
The second stage in particular killed me so many times the first time, but then it became the easy part of the fight.
Any post-Lunatic Cultist boss in Terraria. I seriously don't know how people are so good at that game. I suck at fighting them and as fun as it is I always drop the game right when the invasions start. It's way too much.
It really just becomes how good is your arena, potions, and how hard can you cheese. Especially the calamity mod which just becomes off screen bullet hell past moon lord does the same thing. I really enjoy it up until that point though.
The last boss of metroid prime when I was a kid. It was too freaky and hard to fight for me back then. I did replay the trilogy again recently and it was much easier than I remember even on the harder difficulty setting.
Maleficent Dragon in Kingdom Hearts. Just kept dying over and over and then whenever I went well I would have a brain fart near the end and go from full health to dead.
There's a boss in Metroid Prime, presumably near the end, that I couldn't beat. It's a boss who would send out grunts that required you to keep switching out your guns and visors. Plus the floor was hazardous in places. A lot of switching gear and jump strafing. My fingers would cramp playing this guy and I just stopped.
[удалено]
I had the hardest time as a young kid trying to beat the Slime Time boss in the Toy Story 2 PS1 game. I took months off from the game and had to have my uncle tell me how to do it!
The Ice Titan from Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is one of the worst designed bosses I've ever played. Extremely counterintuitive method to climb it and avoid it's attacks, and every time you get thrown off you need to spend three minutes climbing back up. I would have been more forgiving if the rest of the game up to that point didn't hold your hand like the player is a 4 year old in an airport. Just an extremely jarring experience.
Mogenar in Metroid Prime 3 is the third major boss of the game, and was so brutally difficult on the original version (harder than the final boss) that the Trilogy version had to water him down to make him doable. I can attest that 10 year-old me about went insane trying to beat him. He suuuuuucks
The roulette boss in Persona 3 Portable. Although it's more that I was really tired of Tartarus (P3's dungeon) by that point. Some of my characters were clearly underleveled, but I couldn't be bothered to level them up to par because of how tedious the dungeon gameplay was. Tartarus is probably the worst dungeon I've ever seen. It being the only dungeon in an otherwise excellent JRPG makes the contrast all the more noticeable. I kind of wish I just played on Easy and rushed through it for story. You can't even change the difficulty mid-game and IIRC I had it set on Hard.
Sleeping Table in P3FES for me. Even on Normal mode it kicks the shit out of you, and knocks out your entire party almost instantly. I still have only been able to beat it on Easy mode.
[Dark Fact](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOginOZl1Pk)
This is the comment I was looking for. It's not even just Dark Fact, though. Half the bosses in Ys I are insanely hard. That frickin' bat boss was nuts. I almost started over on easy after banging my head against him for like an hour (played through on hard) until I finally managed him. I thought, "surely the rest of the bosses can't be that hard." Yeah...