Badly Designed Bosses

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what was that one fucking boss in fable 2 that was every single boss

That pissed me off eternally, that ruined my faith in video games. Every single boss was that one thing it had lumps you had to cut off or something, then the final villain just dies in one fucking hit. fuck that game

Trolls. Earth and rock trolls, plus floating diamond laser-portal things, were the only real 'bosses' in Fable 2. Both were bland and unchallenging, but sometimes rather slow to kill, which is the worst combination. Fable didn't have much better bosses in terms of challenge, but had some degree of variety and no hokey weakpoints. One or two your weapon would rebound off of if you attack at the wrong time like Twinblade, but no magic glowy pustules.

Why do they keep copying the Egg Nega Wisp?

It was supposed to be a “challenge area” but only consisted of mobs bombarding you in tight spaces and mages that only exist to slow you down, and the reward for all your hard work is a copy pasted Smelter Demon. Shame, because I liked the rest of the DLC, except for that one staircase with the red phantom gank

There are two DLC areas that are total, irredeemable trash. I won't think any less of people who skip them and don't bother.

That statue gimmick is what made the boss so memorable for me. I had to fight Fume Knight in the back of the room, by the door that leads to the crown otherwise he'd get plenty of heals. About 10% of his total arena.

Bed of Chaos

Almost every humanoid enemy in Dark Souls 3.
They all have infinite combos which can combo into themselves and since poise is nonexistent, getting hit means you are taking the full combo and dying because all the armor is trash. Every single boss has multiple phases so its not even a surprise.

Pretty much this

Made it through, and got the stupid Aged sword. Not what it was hyped up to be, but i'll hang onto it. Now just to throw myself at Alonne for a few hours.

A lot of 2D run-n-gun/platformer games have terrible boss design. Randomized attack patterns that change when you're in mid jump and have no time or option to evade, when a second beforehand it was safe to jump with no red flags. It probably comes from bosses detecting input and rushing in because you're 100% vulnerable. The "difficulty" comes from RNG rather than the skill level of the boss.

When you say it like that, it really makes you wonder wtf they were thinking.

What they should have done was give it a gimped moveset and access to certain parts of its body that are squishy, but only after traversing the entire arena. Instead it was basically Dragon God 2.0.

Actually tried replaying DS2 the other day after having played 3 and BB, but holy fuck it's annoying for exactly those reasons you're mentioning.

Your character also feels a lot slower and more sluggish than in the other games. Combine that with most enemies just coming in hordes and hitting you faster than you recover from stagger and the game actively encourages cheesing.

The Hydra in SCV IV was easy as heck to defeat. One head shoots out three fireballs simultaneously that always travel in the same way, and the other head launches a stream of fire that can only go downward and at the same length every time.

Fuck hiruko and his bullshit. Fuck the magic talismans and their incredibly small hitboxes, fuck his invincibility frames, and fuck the fact that the player must chain kill all the talismans and use psychic premonition to know when hiruko will make himself vulnerable. I seriously hate this boss.

DS2 is complete ass. It's like they took all the artificial difficulty memes that stemmed from DS1, and used them as their core design philosophy.

The giant boss in DS3 that you just take the weapon inside his room and throw some wind at him. Completely boring.

Enemies don’t play the game by the same rules as you do. The most obvious example of this are the archdrakes in Shrine of Amana running through waist-high water at full speed while the same water halves your movement speed. Then after the first initial building on NG+, that group of four archdrakes chain aggros automatically. Their maxes are way too strong considering their light weight and speed, but you get fucked by them anyway because B Team only cares about HARD HARD HARD xD

I hate fromsoft so much

The black phantom versions of these guys. They may as well be bosses.
demonssouls.wikidot.com/giant-depraved-ones

Every single boss in Ys: Oath in Felghana. I had to delete that fucking game because it was so shit and the boss difficulty curve was so much higher than the in-between segments. Seriously, every boss is just trial & error but on a grander, much more annoying scale. Granted, this was on normal mode, but it shouldn't have been as bad as it was.

Hell, it's probably the easiest boss in the entire game unless I'm misremembering.

Sigma is perfectly reactable.

Get a load of this casual, bosses have around half health and are MUCH slower compared to nightmare or inferno, and you still think it's difficult?

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I don't see how nightmare or inferno would even be possible unless you grinded out levels like crazy.

dark souls 2 was the right direction which the series was going and if fromsoftware would have continued that way, dark souls 3 would have been alot better than it is today.

also fuck you for hating on one of the best bosses in the game.

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Why doesn't he just plug-up the empty eye sockets?

Merge the worse from both and you get the final boss from Ninja Gaiden Z.

Someone actually played that game?

It was shit mechanics wise and the texture work was garbage because it was meant to be complimented by a dynamic lighting system, not the static garbage they released with

I actually got 100%, The gameplay is "God of War rip off" tier, but Yaiba and Miss Monday have potential to not be shit if they were put in a better game.

Grinding shouldn't be an issue unless you run past every enemy in the area, and every boss pattern is perfectly dodgeable. As far as I know there's no rng bullshit regarding patterns either, or none that you can't reasonable plan around at the very least.

I watched some guy's "Why Dark Souls 2 is actually the best Souls game" video and boy those comments were cancer

x10,000

All I know is that after every boss, I leveled up about 8 times, despite killing every enemy in any given area, showing me that I must have been underleveled. Some of the boss patterns take a lot of time to recognize, and, like I said, a lot of the difficulty is artificial. Throw in the fact that every single boss is a sponge and you've got terrible game design.

Darkeater Midir. Fuck I hate that boss fight.
Fuck that shit. Titanite slabs aren't worth this.

Lemme guess: It was the one where at one point he shows a video of someone playing through a difficult fight with an intense stare, then compares it to a video of him fighting a boss and acting like an excited child when he wins, and claims that's proof that DS2 is more fun.

Well the guy literally says that the boss fight in the OP is the best fight in the entire series, so there's that.

Wow normalfags have some shit taste

I found the fight at its most fun in co-op, and by the latter end of his health bar when my partner died I had worked out an efficient method of fighting him. He's not too bad - aside from his health pool and that ridiculous Shin Godzilla attack - if you can bear in mind how much of a challenge they wanted it to be.
That being said, I totally understand. It's FromSoft being kind of lazy and unreasonable.

That fight nearly gave me a mental breakdown first time I fought it (NG++ with a DEX build) and only pulled through with help. Soloed it easily with INT builds by gassing his ass with Mercury and on subsequent runs with melee builds (NG+++ with DEX, NG++ with STR-FTH and NG/NG+ with STR) I tackled him solo where I stuck to the two golden rules:
Following those, I pulled through in about 3 attempts at most. More than hard, he's extremely tedious. Did some cop-op there for a bit; I don't like the fight that much and when paired with a host or phantoms that don't stick to the golden rules, someone gets one-shot by a tail swipe but I got help the first time so it's only fair.

My own nomination and maybe it's the salt talking but I'm correctly doing a Hard mode run of Odin Sphere Luftwaffe and the game just goes full blown peak retard on the trials - optional bosses that are usually a mid-boss x2 plus a never ending supply of mobs to the point you'll literally have 20 enemies on screen to deal with. You're getting fucked from every possible angle, everything everyone throws will home in you and damage ranges from 40% of your HP to being one-shot all the while you have to peck every single thing to death and everyone has more poise than fuckin' Havel. Don't think I could do any of this shit without potions.
I should clarify that the boss itself isn't too bad (except Phoenix Rider, that one's pure cancer), just that the trial pits you against 2 of them plus mobs constantly flooding the screen.

You can literally sprint up and kill him with one combo; probably before he can even get an attack off, depending on your damage output.

Boring as shit and way longer than it needs to be be; unless you're a twink or a 2H warrior you're going to be chipping away at that health bar all goddamn day. And god help you if you decide to summon Lautrec and/or Solaire and tack on MORE health.

Basically Moonlight Butterfly except you can't end the fight in 20 seconds with lightning/soul spear

A gimmick fight that somehow manages to be simultaneously boring, tedious and obnoxious.

DUDE RESKINS LMAO

Either the easiest "boss" in the game or an obnoxious dodging minigame.

Either an obnoxious sprintfest or an easy tank-and-spank and either way you can barely see the game between the framerate chugging and all the shit exploding and glowing on the screen.

To be honest, though, I'd say that most of these are just lazy, uninspired. gimmicky and/or boring rather than outright shit; the only really bad one in my estimation is Bed of Chaos. I'll also give an honorable mention to Nito because while he's a breddy gud fight, being Gravelord Sworded from all the way across the fucking arena while his skellies gangbang me in the starting area is a lovely experience.

I normally don't run into Brownie in the early game, when I do I usually just restart the run anyway. If the room has spikes or rocks I can no damage him most of the time. I still hate the Bloat, I've lost so many no damage runs because I forget how quickly he can whip out a laser right as the fight starts.

This asshole. The entire thing is tedious and it comes at the end of the worst stage in the game.
At least Centipede Man later makes up for it.

definitely intentional, so you can give him a taste of his own medicine if you aren't inclined to chance it with that bald cocksucker

I think even the devs agree its shite, i'll even do the exploit when fighting it on replays just to get it over with faster

i forgot about this fucker, i overall liked nioh but the centipede fight was janky as shit

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Yeah, that's an Hbomb vid. I don't necessarily agree with his DS2 review, but he's at least right when he says that a lot of people default to playing too timidly (a lot of the time it's STR/VIT builds with Havels and a shield) to really enjoy the game. The clip he was showing was some dude playing DeS, fighting King Allant, while hiding behind a shield the entire time. It takes the guy forever to win the fight. You can tell from his expression that it wasn't so much as a "difficult fight with an intense stare" as a "tediously drawn out slog" where he didn't do anything risky because clutching his shield for safety the entire time. I've seen a lot of people play souls games and they always say "dark souls is a hard and brutal game where you die a lot" andnthey'll cut to footage where they play the safest fucking builds with a tower shield, havels, and a health bar that's a mile long. People can decide to play the game however they want, but it's always these kinds of shitters that talk up how hard the game is, and I can't see why when they all play like pussies.

I recently did a run through of DS2 with light armor, two caestus, and a crossbow, and it was a blast. Forcing yourself to get up close and personal with danger and parrying things is a definitely more engaging way of playing than shield strafing and fatrolls. It's not always the best, especially when groups of enemies show up, but then it becomes a matter of kiting and doing enough dps to keep mobs at manageable sizes. It's actually pretty awesome chewing through a bosses' health bar when you rapidly slam them with the caustus powerstance. I don't want to say that it's the only fun way to play the game, but it's leagues better than the being a player that uses shields like a crutch.

2 has some of my favourite bits, I can't say i'm a fan of DS 1s opening acts. That first part when you get to the first bonfire is a confusing mess if you don't know where you're going. I once spent hours hugging every wall, to no avail, just trying to find some way to progress. Sometimes simplification isn't so bad, but I really wish it hadn't gone so far in DS3. RIP Poise.

I love using heavy gear, but that's partially for aesthetics. Synn Knight with Rebel Greatshield and a Barbed Club in 2, Drang Armour (with the Lothric Knight helm and Alva's gauntlets swapped in) with Havel's shield and an Irithyll Longsword in 3.

My main problem is how 3 removes any real benefits from most armour as it is, so the weight of the heavier stuff just gets stifling.

Seriously though, DS2 has some good and interesting mechanics that has the potential to be actually good, but was not seen in DS3
Too bad DS3 turned out the way it was. It did something right for casters though, like giving back the MP system, spell acquisition being more straight-forward. and the (sadly underused) holdable spells.

I like it as well since it reminds me of Tarkus's shield. The Raven emblem is better than Tarkus's emblem imo
The last 2 souls game has really good fashion though, however the Drakeblood armor is still my favorite from said games.

What were they thinking

People play Souls (and similar games) defensively because the games reward it while punishing careless play. Going full offence doesn't work unless you already know everything about an enemy, including how its AI works. And while people like to claim that Souls is actually super easy, the enemies do a fuckton of damage and will easily one- or twoshot you. Granted, that's from my experience of playing DeS and DaS with no points in health upgrades and light armor, but as you keep shitting on heavy armor I will assume that you agree that that's the right way to play. Not only is it very easy to die, the bloodstain system is also more punishing than normal checkpoints or save points since dying twice sets you back more and you also lose items if you don't beat the boss after using them. And since you typically have to get through a few enemies to even reach the boss again and be able to retry it, it's even more of a risk and waste of time each time you die.

People play Souls games defensively because the games encourage it with bosses that one- or twoshot you.

I stopped caring after almost killing him, when he suddenly jumped back and started doing the laser beam spam that left no room to dodge.

If you have any trouble playing 'carelessly' in a Souls game you seriously need to check your reflexes. Or git gud.

If you wanna go full bitch mode in a souls game might as well go all the way and stop leveling altogether, let the game be just (you), your feet, and a straightsword(element buffed whe needed).

You gotta compartmentalize that feeling. Souls are cheap, and drop like rain later on, so gimping your playstyle because you let the world get to you is kind of a defeat in and of itself. I've never used a shield in a Souls game (except for Dark Hand and just to parry, because it looks good) and stick to a single dagger/rapier and a bow. Playing conservatively just screams 'I know I'm going to get fucked, the question is to what degree', and that's a terrible outlook to have in a game like this.

Good reflexes will fuck you over against some attacks unless you already know them, because the enemy will just hit you at the end of your roll. Either way that doesn't mean shit when the game is designed to be extremely punishing for making a single mistake, which is what makes people play defensively in the first place.

Considering I only wear light armor, put no points into defensive stats and my most used weapon is a longsword, that's already close enough to what I do. The mentality of going attackattackattack doesn't work in Souls anyway, because stamina is a thing and you have to let it recharge.
Speaking of which

True offensively playstyles don't work in Souls because stamina limits both your offensive and defensive options. If you take every opportunity to hit a boss you simply don't have stamina to do it and dodge.

Nigger that's some hyperpretentious bullshit. 'If you play the games with the tools they gave you and in the way they designed the game to encourage, you're playing it wrong!' That's why there are a ton of different shields and every depiction of the player character is wearing armor, right? Whether you like it or not, the 'default' way to play Souls is far more defensive than how I play them. And you will get fucked in Souls, it's completely unavoidable in a game where enemies do enough damage to kill you in one or two hits. Doing a boss flawlessly comes after learning it, and avoiding an attack the first time you see it is as much luck as skill, more so when it's attacks that fake you out or that aren't obvious just by seeing the enemy start it. Unless you're going to pretend that all of you went through the game without taking a hit even once, this kind of bullshit mentality doesn't work. You will get hit while learning a boss. People play defensively to minimize the punishment and reduce the amount of trial and error.
Also it doesn't matter how common souls are, people never want to lose something they had, especially not when the experience points double as money. Your argument is that people should play in a way that both goes against how the game is designed and the way humans work, and that's somehow going to bring them the most satisfaction.

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Good thing DS had soul memory so the enemies disappeared after a while.

Why did anyone ever think that Final Fantasy XIII was good

I found the whole "pseudo action combat with emphasis on movement and aiming except you can't directly move your characters" shit to be way more annoying. At least make an accessory that gives you something like 75% resistance to death if you read a guide to figure out how crafting works

The anti-death item was useful and all, but Orphan still felt like it wasn't even designed with the game they were making in mind

"Annoyingly drawn out and anticlimactic" sounds pretty FF13 to me.

Doesn't Persona games have the same shit? If MC dies it's instant game over, and I think Skies of Arcadia as well (playing it the first time). Probably a ton of JRPGs do this.

I did a playthrough of ds2 and then went straight into ds3 and ds3 felt like I was floating, it was so much more responsive and quicker then ds2.

That's why you manage your stamina gauge, no point in using all the bar with only one action, that's why slow movement and weak hits are a thing, not to mention there is the tradeoff between the different char points and the requirements for weapons, you can go with a perfectly viable glass cannon build and stick to a low level so you then force yourself to waste all your souls in consumables.

If you think that Eggman fight is hard then you're a retard with no patience/skill

This. So much this.

First half of DaS1 > DaS2 > second half of DaS1. DaS2 is pretty fun when you dodge shit and melee. Pure caster builds are a lot of fun also. DaS2 still has a ton of issues, but it's nowhere near as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. Decent game. But fuck the spear hollow with perfect 360° tracking.

Another spectacularly badly designed boss is Sindragosa from World of Warcraft. The boss has a stacking debuff that stacks up when you melee the boss, with each stack doing more damage over time. The boss also has ANOTHER stacking debuff that stacks whenever a spell is cast and the stacks blow up after you stop casting for a few seconds. The way this plays out is that you spend 80% of the fight not doing ANYTHING because you can't get debuff stacks too high. It's a boss fight very literally designed around doing NOTHING. Fuck you, Blizzard.

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Managing your stamina bar in souls means waiting. This isn't nioh where you have ki pulses.

Too bad they ruined the NG+ unique enemies/red phantoms by making they drop random gear, resulting in a dogshit grind if you wanted their stuff.

I would say
But it doesn't feel like it gets easier, it just feels fucking annoying and like a chore to even kill this whore every new run, I don't even die to her anymore, she just feels like an entire level of a parkour game that takes too fucking long to complete.
If there's two enemies on screen at once, that's manageable, if there are three or more, you're fucking pushing it. Atleast I think she can have the skeletons and Velstadt out at once, correct me if i'm wrong.
The Abyss Watchers atleast had the gimmick where the third Watcher to rise the chance to randomly hit his teammates, which is good because it gave you some time to slow down and focus on one target, they COULD have been clever and have Velstadt after like half a minute start attacking the boss herself since you know,
VELSTADT STILL RETAINED HIS HUMANITY
But nope, because that would actually be good lore writing, and Dark Souls 2 made sure to have the shittiest lore possible.
Didn't help that the other boss in this fucking DLC was literally just a three man gank squad.
Though that isn't to say A Team didn't fall under this trap atleast once, see pic related.

Can we really even consider him a boss? The real boss fight was dealing with his goons right behind him.

Yes. Plus, she can summon Velstadt immediately again if you happen to kill him. The one time I regretted doing my full solo no shield run on freakin' NG+4; first and only time I ever used the Brightbug items.

It's likely a apparition in his image. IIRC the "deep lore" take is that he was a Shulva knight before becoming Vendrick's right hand man.

I'd say they are a gank squad done right given you can tackle them solo with just about any build. One is very aggressive, one keeps a distance and the other just kinda stands there only attacking if you attack him, the area has that large tombstone to let you keep them separated and you can choose whether to whittle them all down at the same time or try to kill one at a time (IMO the ideal is a mix of both, with the caster as the first to kill, then the sword guy and leave lamp one for last).

I can't say I liked any boss in that game besides the first one and the last one, really.

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>it only got worse after the boss fight
Goddammit I should never have played it.

Not exactly a bad boss, but one that feels like it was scaled for somewhat later in the game, when you'd have more in the way to properly deal with it. Certainly not unbeatable, but a right pain in the ass on a first playthrough, when the player just doesn't have access to the items/equipment/defensive skills to set at such a low level to stay alive better. Later required bosses can be hard, but they tend to feel more fair for what you should have access to at that point.

I remember seeing people complain about how hard it was even before the 360 original came out, since Namco apparently had it as a boss in the game's demo.

I honestly haven't run across a lot that pull that myself, but maybe my experiences are still a bit limited. Does seem silly that if you were to have revival spells/items throughout the rest of the characters, if the protagonist goes down they wouldn't be able to bring him back.

Odin Sphere likes doing that because of the mechanic that you restore one of your resources by absorbing enemy souls. While the mooks can be annoying in their own right during boss fights, the swarms of them in play are to keep you from being stuck with just POW as a resource (as well as an additional threat to worry about. Double Frost Ben was absolute hell as Oscar from what I remember though, whether the mooks were around or not, and yes, the game seems to expect you to make and use your alchemy regularly.

You're level 20 during the demo but I think you have less artes than you would've normally.

Freedom Wars had a good game at its core. Unfortunately, that good game was dumped into an unfathomably deep abyss of bad design decisions.

Protagonist dying resulting in a Game Over only really makes sense in Baldur's Gate.

Not bosses per se, but it still kinda qualifies
The King Spiders are better than these fuckers

I fucking hate that RNG-based gear-drop.
JUST GIVE ME THE WHOLE SET AND BE DONE WITH IT GODDAMN
I DON'T WANT THE SAME FUCKING COPY OF LEGGINGS THAT I'VE ALREADY OWNED
What's more the DLC even revels in this bullshit,
>Even if you get it all, the princess's soul could only be used for a twig-looking sword that heals people but breaks in 4 uses, what a piece of shit

While a fun game the bump mechanics make the final boss of Ys I garbage, and I.N.E.P.T. For Yooka-Laylee has to be one of the worst designed bosses I've encountered in recent history.

non of these would I consider really badly designed bosses. Then again I have a soft spot for Dork Sowells 2. Not remarkable bosses but not "Bad". My least favorite "souls" boss has to be Graverobber, Varg, and Cerah. Lud and Zallen, the King's Pets would be a close second for worst boss. Honorable mention goes to Darkeater Midir not for being a bad boss but for being to damn hard even for a "souls" game. Best Boss's in all Dark Souls series hands down is Sister Friede & Slave Knight Gael

I hope you are not implying because Shadow of Yharnam was exhilarating the first time I fought them and they where not even that difficult.

Have you tied fighting that fucker on Nightmare? There is literally no strategy, you just got to keep throwing your self at him over and over again until you get lucky.

The constant unskippable plot combined with increasingly tedious fights and F2P-esque real time timers for manufacturing items crippled what had the potential to be a great game.
At least we got Soul Sacrifice Delta.

I defeated the boss on Nightmare, after lots and lots of tries, and theoretically there is a strategy, though I never bothered to explore it. I just went at him, until I beat him. The boss has the same pattern, every time, he never changes his pattern, not even when you attacks, his pattern is also easy to predict(he just bounces off walls). Whenever you hit him, the floor disappears, and while it doesn't affect the bosses pattern, it affects your pattern of movement and thus attack, plus you can also get stuck. There's also the fireballs, that don't do all that much damage, so you can tank most of them, but if I am not mistaken, their pattern, is that they fall where you stand, and break into four pieces. Knowing all that, you can plan out the exact movements you have to do on paper and execute them in the game, and you will win the fight every time.
The only strategy I implemented, is the same one, as in the video at 0:28, where he is in the top left corner, and you can easily land some hits on him, while the upper part of the platform falls.

Also if a floor disappear while you're standing on it it's an instant kill. I liked the PCE fight much more.

I'd say any and literally all bosses from stealth games that aren't MGS.

[Path of Exile]-(Vaal Oversoul, Act 3 Piety)

Ah god the loyce soul grind. I beat everything about DS2 except for that. Dealing with the snow stags was less bullshit.

They were thinking that corporate gave them half the budget and time they had to work on X5.

I don't even remember this boss and I finished DS2 the other day. Is she the one at the end of the Kings Cave thingy area just before the end of the game? If so, I one-shot her just by keeping her on the edges and baiting her out of the things.

It sounds like you just suck at the game, I had no problems with any of the bosses in that game.

This guy is just shit in comparison with the rest, which is a shame because they nailed the boss personality and the presentation

I know that feel

TO HELL WITH THIS GARBAGE
I wanted to like the game and still do but man MAN that's TERRIBLE design and TERRIBLE gameplay

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It's explained in Persona 3 but what isn't explained is why you still get a game over after the reasoning is revealed and the problem is solved. Also, 4 and 5 have no explanation but do it anyway.

The only bullshit part of the boss is having to redo all the story crap before it if you fail. The boss itself is retardedly easy.

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You cannot do this in the base game.

Must be terrible to be so inherently ignorant to the masterpiece that is Dark Souls 2.

what is distorted real impact with dante
git gud faggot

also

Or I had a shitty copy.

I'm currently playing through that, it really depends on who you're playing but yeah those three are way harder than the rest.
The airship ain't too bad except with Oswald where you have to hit&run all the fucking time especially when the flamethrower pops up, the mooks are an almost non issue
The Phoenix rider has less tells but she's the easiest of the three by far, just switch side often with the appropriate move and fuck off far away from the lava pillar attack, if you pummel her hard enough you never see the most cancerous attack she has, dunno what you're finding so hard about her, especially since I think the trial stage with her has you playing Cornelius the stun rapetrain.
Frost Ben is fucking atrocious in every way and two of them just make it so that he can stunlock you into fucking oblivion very easily and they always do fucking offscreen bullshit too, only thing I had to actually plan around using potions at all to win against thus far, on this once you have to eradicate the mooks asap or you're getting fucked regardless, also you need to get really fucking good about differentiating the breath attack startup and elemental spawning attack.

Special mention to the Myconid trial stage which is just fucking atrocious because you have a limited moveset and nothing really good to deal with them by that point.