That final boss in Anachronox straight up sucks. I don’t remember if I cheated or gave up and watched the ending on YouTube

I appreciated that after several Street Fighter games in which Sagat was significantly more difficult than actual final boss M. Bison, they finally made M. Bison truly challenging in Street Fighter Alpha 3.

Ruby Weapon in the Final Fantasy VII PS1 game.

I even followed the guide, so I just couldn’t figure it out.

There’s boss fights occasionally in Dave the Diver and they just. I hate all of them lol. There was one at night I kept having to reload and just hope the weapon it gave me was the one that I was decent enough at that I finally got it.

Man if I ever had to fight Groal the Great again…

The last boss in Tears of the Kingdom comes to mind. Too damn hard for me, and my motivation to try over and over was low since I knew it was the end of the game. That’s happened with a lot of final bosses for me. “I could spend a lot of time beating it, but why? The game is basically over.”

Three I can think of

Rebel Flagship from FTL: Faster Than Light

I fucking hate FTL and everybody hails it as the best thing since sliced bread for effectively inventing the roguelike genre. It’s an incredibly poorly balanced game that boils down to travelling across each sector, bouncing between beacons, fighting hostile ships, encountering random events and whether you choose to engage with these events, rolling the die and (more times than not) getting screwed over by dogshit RNG.

I’ve only reached the Last Stand twice. On the first time, I engaged the Rebel Flagship, had over half my health taken out in a few shots then decided to retreat. Retreating triggered an instant Game Over because the game was glitched. The second time around, I made it to the second phase before dying.

This is how rough the game is on Normal mode…

Xemnas from Kingdom Hearts 2

This is more like me not having the patience to learn the fight. Roxas had already worn me the fuck down, and the only way I got past him was to effectively cheese the fight with Megalixirs, Limit Form and Ars Arcanum spam, which is easier said than done. I not only had to grind my drive forms up significantly beforehand, but I also had to intentionally manipulate the game’s RNG so as to not trigger Anti Form at any point in the fight.

Xemnas is like a far more bullshit version of Ansem from KH1, in the respect that both are lengthy multi-phase fights that can take 20 - 30 minutes under normal circumstances, but unlike Ansem, his Nobody counterpart now has the ability to drive you down to 1HP with an unavoidable QTE attack where he launches a flurry of combos which you have to perfect parry.

And I think generally, Kingdom Hearts 2 is an objectively worse game than the first one in almost every respect, aside from the fluidity of its combat system. It has serious difficulty spikes, some incredibly bullshit boss mechanics, lacks the interactive game world that the first game had, gave us a substantially worse version of Atlantica that plays like a cringe Little Mermaid sing-along rhythm game, has substantially worse gummi ship sections, and unlike the first game, and it generally began the point where the plot of the entire franchise would start turning into a confusing clusterfuck.

And it’s not like I’m bad at Kingdom Hearts games either. Riku 2 took me a grand total of two attempts to beat in the first game, and the way I was able to beat both Riku fights so easily was because I learned quickly not to execute a full keyblade combo on him and cancel right before the last swing, because he will do an undodgeable counter. Also, Riku 2’s ultimate attack can be easily dodged by just jumping up and gliding around the arena. Even Sephiroth (the game’s bonus superboss) is pretty easy with healing items or Leaf Bracer/Curaga.

Elder Princess Shroob from Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

Superstar Saga was a masterpiece. Its sequel on the other hand is linear as fuck, has bad writing, is ruined by the Baby Mario Bros who wear the same red and green outfits as their adult counterparts and therefore make Bros Moves substantially hard to pull off (as it’s easy to get A/X and B/Y mixed up.)

For me it’s the game that killed the Mario & Luigi series.

I could never get past the final boss and I’m convinced that my copy of the game is either glitched or she was designed to be a damage sponge. I genuinely gave up after one attempt took me well over half an hour only for me to die.

This asshole

I might have beat him, not sure, might have used debug mode. 0 rings? 12 hits? Spike arms? Blegh.

This is a really weird one I’m sure, but Ursula from Kingdom Hearts… 1? Can’t remember which.

I built my character for magic first, then attack, defense last.

It’s not a hard boss fight but I wasn’t scaling well in the game and hadn’t gotten to where magic damage was supposedly OP so I hit a wall.

Never got past it. Can’t go back and replay because honestly there’s a lot about that game that hasn’t aged well.

I’m not normally such a noob, this boss is my forever shame.

The first bosses of Cuphead 😭

I’ve never technically beaten the final Bowser boss in Super Mario 64. Me and my siblings grew up with the game as kids. I remember us having 114 out of 120 stars. We were trying really hard to 100% the game, then I think it was our nephews who ended up deleting our save. That was a sad day.

We never did find the second secret slide. I only found where it was once my best friend showed me the location as adults.

I was a couple of attempts short of calling it quits on Simon in Clair Obscur. I don’t like QTEs and the whole fight is “parry or die”

And yes I know now that I could have done the cheese strat of megabuffing Maille for a one shot but I think reading strategy guides for single player games is a major dork move

Afterward, I wasn’t excited or proud. I was just relieved to not think about it anymore

In terms of total time since I first played the game to finally beating it, probably Cave Story’s Ballos fight for me. I had a fan made port of the game for the PSP back in '06 ish, struggled a lot to get the regular ending, found out about the true ending, and couldn’t ever beat the Last Cave (Hidden), much less gauntlet of challenges beyond it. I think at the most I had seen that there was a secret area beyond the “final boss” for the true ending and the fan name for it, but never been. I might have once gotten to it but I know for certain I never ever beat it or the true final boss.

At some point around about 2018 ish I think I saw that they had a rerelease for the game on the Switch titled Cave Story+, where I fell in love with the game all over again and finally played it to its true completion. I still have all of the screenshots and videos I took during my first completion of that boss fight. I think since then I have beaten it on Hard Mode, but only ever on the Switch version with Co-op mode which allows you to double your damage output being that you have 2 players, so it’ll be interesting trying to go back and complete it again soon without almost any Health pickups at all.

Pandemonium Warden from FFXI.