Spoilers ahoy! Turn away now if you don’t want spoiled on the endings of certain games! You have been warned!
Dark Souls – Bed of Chaos
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
Dark Souls is a very frustrating game, but for the right reasons. Its boss encounters are brutally difficult, but with some practice, and a careful reserve, they can be bested. The reason this dynamic works is because the game is very rarely unfair. You always know exactly why you died, a feeling which only makes you want to jump back in and try again. So when the game decides to change its tact and throw in a boss that requires more luck than anything else, you bet that it quickly gets annoying. The Bed of Chaos is pretty awesome on the face of it. After sliding down a huge ravine you are greeted by a truly terrifying creature. It doesn’t take long to realize that this isn’t your standard Dark Souls boss fight though, as you run behind it and land your first hit.
A cutscene plays, before the player is forced to run a gauntlet of crumbling floors and huge sweeping arm attacks. The fight hinges on the player’s ability to dodge, jump and run past the obstacles, something which leads to more than a few random fall-deaths and weird shaky platforming. Eventually though, you’ll land another blow and breathe a sigh of relief, surely it’s time to fight the damn thing mano-a-mano? Not exactly, because once again it’s time for another difficult obstacle course! This time there’s rising fire attacks which take half your health, more crumbling floors and even a part where you have to jump onto one of the creature’s roots from a height. If you do manage to make the jump without being wistfully cast aside into the abyss, you’ll have to dodge roll your way through some twigs, where you’ll encounter your true enemy. After all that annoyance, all that falling and being tossed around like a ragdoll, you’re greeted by a small worm which you must one-hit kill, ending the fight. The Bed of Chaos is an unwelcome change in direction from a game that is otherwise so focused on its promise of harsh but fair boss encounters.
BioShock – Fontaine
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
The first BioShock is a modern masterpiece. The game excels in its quieter, survival horror-focused moments, in which carefully exploring the underwater city of Rapture is both eerie and inviting. This feeling is present for the majority of the game, that is until you reach what you think is the end, and then the game decides to throw another two hours of content at you that feels more like a first-person shooter, and not a good one at that. The final boss is the cherry on top of this annoying slog towards the credits, being about as generic as it gets where video game bosses are concerned.
The fight with Adam-imbued Frank Fontaine is a seriously frustrating one, in that it rests on all of the weakest parts of BioShock’s troublesome control scheme. There’s no way to effectively dodge, given that there was little need to up to this point, so Frank’s charging attacks get old quickly. Remember how plasmids could be combined with weapons in cool and interesting ways? Well not here. Instead, you have to rely on the biggest and loudest weapons which make up your now bloated inventory, mindlessly shooting rocket after rocket into a roided out hunk of mediocrity. The real hair-pulling begins when the alarms are triggered and 20 or so of those flying bots (you know the ones) come out to play. It’s essentially a bullet-hell encounter without any level of control, and for that, Frank Fontaine will go down as being very annoying indeed.
Resident Evil 6 – Derek C. Simmons
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
The Resident Evil series has become the unofficial king of frustrating boss fights in recent years (with Resident Evil 7 thankfully eschewing the trend). In Resident Evil 6, you fight a man called Derek C. Simmons (pro tip: if you’re naming a scary boss, maybe Derek isn’t the way to go). Sorry that’s actually a lie, in Resident Evil 6 you fight Derek C. Simmons five times. The first encounter is enough to put you off boss fights for good, as you unload round after pistol round into the sort of inside-out bull form of Derek while balancing on top of a train. He quickly returns though, this time as a giant scabby dinosaur who fills the screen and shines a light on the game’s less than stellar camera controls. You’ll sigh in desperation as Leon is yet again trampled over by dinosaur Derek, until you get lucky and land a shot into one of his eyes.
You’d think this would be the final form of Derek, I mean where do you go from dinosaur really? The answer is giant chicken, obviously. Once again you’ll battle the camera (the true boss of Resident Evil 6) as you shoot ol’ bird-brain in his sturdy thighs until he predictably dissolves back into man-Derek. Man-Derek is keeper of the quick-time events so you’ll have to enter a dull action sequence/rhythm game in order to best him, something which is rarely fun in any game, period. Finally, Derek will transform into a building-sized fly and suck out any enthusiasm you might have left for the game. your frustration will peak after you’ve finally killed him and realise that there’s still more to come. More wrestling with the camera, more mindless shooting, but thankfully, no more Derek.
Gears of War – General RAAM
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
Few boss fights are so ingrained in my memory as General RAAM in the first Gears of War game. The most frustrating thing about this fight is that it highlights the inherent weaknesses of basing an entire game’s movement design on a cover-based system. General RAAM also shows you just how incompetent your AI companion can be, all the while just being a general pain in the behind. At the start of the fight, Dom will reveal his brilliant strategy of running headfirst at RAAM, a strategy which invariably ends up with him being knocked down immediately. The annoyance doesn’t stop there either, as General RAAM serves as a real greatest hits of terrible boss cliches. He’ll regularly put up a shield making him invulnerable, pin you down with a huge machine gun and repeat the same dialogue over and over again.
You fire shot after drawn out shot from your sniper rifle, sometimes hitting the swarm of enemies shielding RAAM, sometimes hitting the ugly brute himself. He inevitably comes moving towards you, meaning that you have to rely on the game’s finicky-at-times movement systems, usually resulting in you getting shot in the back of the skull over and over again. Reviving Dom is both crucial and pointless given that as soon as he stands up he charges once again into the barrel of RAAM’s machine gun. The main reason RAAM will go down in the annals of annoying boss fights is because he restricts movement in a game that is all about constantly moving to new cover. The following cinematic is awesome though, going a small way to make up for one hell of a stressful boss fight.
Far Cry 5 – Joseph Seed
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
Now, we’ve spent hours lamenting why Far Cry 5’s ending is dumb, but here we’ll be talking about its final boss fight, with Joseph Seed himself. The Far Cry series has always had a problem with bosses, offering them up as bullet-sponges who spout exposition and send wave after wave of fodder at the player. Joseph Seed is no different, though this time around, he’s even more annoying than usual. The game often uses drugs to elevate its boss fights, granting enemies supernatural abilities with a vague connection to the narrative. Far Cry 5’s drug of choice, Bliss, is used to give Seed teleportation powers.
The fight involves Seed teleporting around, downing your friends, all the while spouting his now trademark brand of cultist nonsense. You have to constantly revive your friends, while fighting Joseph Seed at the same time. It’s this that makes the fight particularly tedious in that you will just have finished healing one teammate only for another to drop dead behind you. It’s a seriously unnecessary layer on top of an already annoying encounter, one with multiple phases and a more than a bit silly conclusion.
Borderlands – The Destroyer
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
You know what’s more annoying than having to listen over and over to everyone go on about a magical vault filled with treasure? Getting to said magical vault and finding a giant monster instead. This is how Borderlands chose to end its awesome tale of outlaws and treasure hunters, with a dull as dishwater boss fight involving a blob called The Destroyer. Generic name aside, what makes this boss so annoying is that it is incredibly difficult if you aren’t a high enough level to beat it yet, not that you’d know that anyway. If you’ve got the right loadout and characters with the ability to penetrate shields then it’s a breeze, if not though, well then tough luck.
It’s this poor design that makes The Destroyer so well and truly annoying, coupled with a nagging sensation that you’ve been seriously short-changed on the whole treasure front. If it kills you, you’ll lose a ton of money and time, something which will happen over and over if you’re not prepared. Best tackled with a friend but even then so utterly boring, The Destroyer is both one of the most anticlimactic and frustrating bosses ever to grace a video game. Thankfully Borderlands 2 rectified this.
Wolfenstein: The New Order – Mecha Deathshead
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
No great Wolfenstein game would be complete without facing off against a giant mechanical Nazi. In the excellent Wolfenstein: The New Order, you battle it out with Mecha Deathshead, and it’s, well, pretty damn difficult. First of all there’s the fact that the final part of the fight takes place in a cramped basement filled with burning hot flames and explosions. Second, Mecha Deathshead’s shield only allows him to be harmed every ten seconds or so. Bundle all of this together with a very traditional take on a FPS movement system and you’ve got a recipe for smashed controllers my friend.
It essentially boils down to yet another slog in which you fire anything and everything at the your metallic menace, which seriously becomes tiring if you didn’t bring enough ammo to the fight. At harder difficulties, the fight becomes an exercise in luck and your ability to spray and pray while dodging anything that looks remotely like an explosive. It’s hard to make giant bosses with guns interesting, we get it, but at least make them fun.
Uncharted 4 – Rafe
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
Another contender for least threatening name for a final boss. Rafe’s boss fight at the end of Uncharted 4 does the thing which no great boss fight should ever do, center around a brand new game mechanic. This is what happens in the game’s final fight as Nate and Rafe battle it out pirate-style with swords. Problem is, we’d never used a sword before in Uncharted 4, so while this fight could come across as cool and refreshing, it instead ends up being annoying due to the fact you have to be taught how to fight.
It’s more a pain if you’re playing on something harder than normal. At higher difficulties, it takes just one hit to fail the game. This would be all fine and dandy if there was any meaningful way to guess where an attack is coming from. Trying to guess them is a futile effort, with Rafe consistently mixing up his attack patterns. It’s a strange mix of luck-based parrying and QTEs, one which ultimately leaves a very poor taste in your mouth. Previous Uncharted bosses have been largely pretty dull, so we’ll commend Naughty Dog for offering up something new, and narratively it was pretty sweet that much is true. The way it is implemented though is enough to make anyone pull their hair out.
The Legend of Zelda – Skyward Sword
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
When will video game developers learn that fighting a boss multiple times in a game is so rarely any fun at all. It can work if the boss was at all interesting to begin with, not the case for The Imprisoned in The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword. You fight this giant leech creature three times, with very little variation. Skyward Sword featured more modern controls than the series is usually known for. Even so, the camera was a nightmare at best, especially when presented with an enemy as large as this one.
The Imprisoned features a host of attacks but by far the most annoying is the fact that it causes shock-waves when it walks which knock Link over. Particularly annoying when you consider that you must get close to the beast in order to hurt it. What usually ends up happening is that you make several ill-fated attempts to attack its legs before getting annoyed and trying to drop onto its back. There’s about a 10 percent success rate with this maneuver, but it’s your best shot.
Street Fighter IV – Seth
Frustrating Boss Fights That Almost Spoiled a Great Game
Fighting game bosses hold a special place where frustrating video game bosses are concerned. A lot of the time, they rely on cheap tactics involving button tracking and AI that is a little too on the all-knowing side of things. Seth uses every cheap tactic in the book, feeling like playing the very worst of button-mashers. Seth teleports around the arena, charging attacks in impossibly short times and attacks almost exclusively in power moves.
Put simply, he plays in a way that no average player could possibly replicate, combining the strengths of ever other character in the roster but possessing none of their weaknesses. He puts a real downer on what is otherwise a great game, serving as an incredibly frustrating finale that seems more unfair than anything else.
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