Boss Fights

Ahh, bosses. Present in nearly all videogames, bosses are supposed to take the role of being the final and most powerful enemy in a level or chapter of a game. There are all kinds of bosses. The easy, the hard, the annoying, the strange, and even the funny. I'll post my opinions on bosses in the forms of either top tens/fives or some stuff like that. I got some bosses in mind that i will type down here, and they'll fall into a category, being either good, bad, hard, easy, cinematic or just plain boring. Today, i'll do good and bad. Here we go:

Good Category - Ubistvo

Resident Evil 6. One of the most recent and weaker entries in the Resident Evil franchise. RE was always creative with its bosses, but the latest entries like 5, 6 and Revelations were a bit weak on the frightening element.

However, in the Ada Playthrough of 6, something changed it all.

So you're going around the suburbs of a city in China. Only weak zombies cross you and you're just sitting there, bored, until you jump over a barrier and cross a mountain of flaming cars. You land to see a cocoon right in front of you. It starts rattling, and then it hatches.

It doesn't technically hatch. A chainsaw bursts out of it, and cuts the cocoon in half. Before you stands a gruesome 6 foot tall aberration - the Ubistvo, also the Serbian word for "Murder". The fight starts off with you escaping from it. Since it's ridiculously stubborn, it's gonna try to take you down by cutting off whatever makes your platforms stand. At some moments, you escape from him, but this guy appears nearly everywhere you go. So you get a key to unlock a door, an important one for you to proceed the game. This bastard busts through and gets the key from you. You just have to grab it. Simple, right? No. The key is lodged in the thing's chainsaw.

You realize that if you even approach this thing, it'll behead you or impale you immediately. The Ubistvo, combined with ridiculous attack power, moderate speed and absolutely bonkers defense, will chase you down while swinging its chainsaw at you. There's even a bigger problem. The zombies will bring you down by grabbing your leg, and if the Ubistvo's near you, let's just say Ada's gonna have a bad time. This thing doesn't give up. It's so persistant it's annoying. Did i also say that its chainsaw serves as its goddamn heart? Spooky.

Bad Category - World's Saviors

The MARDEK series is pretty old, and pretty underrated too. It presents a great storyline with neat mechanics and fair bosses. This, or these, particular bosses, are the unbearably annoying and tough ones, and just bad ones. There are few bad bosses to pick in Mardek, since most of them present good design and offer a fair level of difficulty. Except from the four lazy ripoffs of your own god damned party. The World's Saviors consist of four members: Bartholio, the self-centered buff knight, Vinnie, the annoyingly bland Irish-like thief, Aalia, the typical dumb teenager, and Bernard, the very very old wizard guy. We're talking about the fight in MARDEK 3, the one after the Fire Guardian. Due to the Fire Guardian's challenge, he probably wore you out a lot. You grab the crystal, the temple dies and you're ready to go home. Until these kids burst in front of you. You better have your teammates healed.

Let's kick this off with Bartholio. The great leader of the Saviors might inflict some fear with his greatsword, but he's laughably weak. Most of his attacks end up missing, but if all 3 of his allies fall, he goes berserk and hits extremely hard. Not too much to fear.

Moving on to Vinnie. Possibly the most annoying one out of the four, Vinnie inflicts annoying status effects such as poison, blindness and sleep. He inflicts very little damage and goes down really fast, but he can also heal himself.

Coming to Aalia, the teen girl. Every RPG that takes the subject seriously has a healer. Aalia is a healer, and a terribly annoying one at that. You can't take this skank out fast enough. She'll always stop and heal herself for lots of HP or heal her whole team for a moderate ammount of HP. She's the most fragile out of the bunch.

And ending on the strongest of them. Bernard has a vast arsenal of magic attacks up his sleeve. He can deal serious damage with a Water attack, a Fire attack and a Thunder attack, and one hidden attack that doesn't even have a name. It is only used when he has 0 MP, and it can also serve as a god-damn counter attack! It deals approximately 2600 - 3200 damage, and check this: He absorbs the HP you lost when you took that attack!

So, what are some good, bad, boring, cool, whatever bosses you guys got? Leave them down there and i'll check it out.

Alright, time to give my opinions on the hard boss and the easy boss.

Hard Category - Dark Serge

Chrono Cross, another game that is honestly underrated. Being the sequel or whatever of Chrono Trigger, it's a very awesome game with over 40 bosses. This boss here is the first boss you face towards the end of the game. And god damn, is he hard.

So, lemme fill you in for a bit. [SPOILER ALERT]

Serge is the main and silent protagonist of Chrono Cross. The game is divided in two worlds: Home World, where everything is fine and happy (AKA Present) and the "Another World", in which you have actually been dead for the past ten years (AKA Future). In the half of the game, you defeat a boss named General Viper, the chief of the Acacia Dragoons, an army that is out there to capture and arrest you for thinking you are a ghost. After the battle, a man named Lynx, Viper's associate, kills him. Lynx reveals he used General Viper to get to Fort Dragonia to get the Frozen Flame, an artifact he lied about to the Acacia Dragoons just so he could get his hands on it. He then sees you witnessed everything, so he tries to kill you. After beating Lynx, your friend Kid bursts into the room, saying she'll get revenge after Lynx killed her parents and sister. Lynx then asks Serge if he ever questioned who he truly was and your significance in the world up to now. Lynx then says the boundary of space and time was torn that day you died ten years ago and says a part of him also died. Having witnessed a flashback of being brutally attacked by a lynx, Serge steps up to fight him again. Lynx says that if Serge ignores him, he will be erasing his own existence. Serge looks deep into the Frozen Flame, and sees that his reflection is actually Lynx. Serge falls down due to a severe headache and gets up with an evil aura surrounding him. Kid asks him if he is okay, and he begins talking. Lynx looks at his own body and realized that they indeed switched souls.

TL;DR: Lynx is now Serge and Serge is now Lynx. So Serge needs to get his body back.

Onto the bossfight. Dark Serge presents a big ammount of HP. He doesn't look so terrifying physically. The scariest thing in his physical appearance is the awesome looking scythe he wields. Dark Serge has an arsenal of devastating attacks, including all three of Lynx's signature techniques GlideHook, FeralCats and ForeverZero, an extremely powerful Black innate attack that can leave all your party in critical health. Dark Serge also has Attacks like Volcano and Tornado, two superpowerful Level 6 attacks that will deal 280-430 damage to your party. While his normal Attacks aren't immensely strong, they are very good to wear your team down so he can cast powerful moves to kill you afterwards. And about the Revive element? There are only FOUR REVIVES IN THE ENTIRE GAME. You probably have two or three by now.

Easy Category - Egg Emperor

Okay, people will disagree with me here. The Egg Emperor is super easy if you're going on good in the game. Sonic Heroes' bosses aren't much of a big deal, but they consider this one the hardest aside from the final boss. The Egg Emperor has a lotta weapons. A sword that shoots scimitars, a shield, missiles that come out of the back of its head and even a charge attack that is only used when you are far from him, plus cannons and endless robots seal the deal. The easiest way to do it is with Team Dark. Defeat all robots or just attack until the Team Blast gauge is filled up. Use the Team Blast that will freeze time for some seconds. You get into flying mode with Rouge and spam Thunder Shoot or spam Homing Attacks with Shadow. You'll end up killing him super fast. I did it in 58 seconds.

Anyways, that's it for the hard and the easy bosses. I'll be back with others.

Not really going to follow the format but I'll just spray and pray a few cents:

Favorite Boss Battle: Badlands Showdown - Raiden vs Samuel Rodriguez - Metal Gear Rising

Everything about this Boss battle in this rather once memetic and still loveable game (for me at least), was set up to be one of those boss battles that shows the brilliance of the Metal Gear lore despite MGRR being a spinoff and not a core MGS game. The game pretty much set up Sam as that guy who the player really wants to hate, yet he was also the enemy that had a good point on Raiden's fallacies. He pretty much smacked us in the intro level with no effort whatsoever, which set up Raiden's transformation into the killing machine that he is. Throughout the game, Sam pretty much taunted us, calling us pretentious and whatnot, and eventually in the Badlands Showdown, an ENTIRE LEVEL was needed for a boss fight because that was how Sam was.

Anyway, more on the boss fight, I found this to be the most enjoyable boss fight in the whole game not just for it being a strong gauge on your understanding of the game, but also how it was all set up. The aesthetic presentation of the boss fight was excellent. It was a wild-west style showdown but with Swords, fists, and kicks, along with that Rockin "The only thing I know is real" Sam Rodriguez theme. And its fought over a massive area of land instead of just an enclosed arena like the rest of the boss battles were. Then again, the set up with Sam as the No. 2 Boss was just that damn good that an ENTIRE LEVEL was needed to give it justice.

And in the end, after that victory... the scene after the battle is quite touching.


Least Favorite Boss - Son of the Sun - Chrono Trigger

This is more of a mini game than an actual boss battle but its part of that rather epic chain of sidequests to get all of the epic gear for the characters. But I never really liked how it was more of a guessing game than an actual turn-based beat down like what most bosses usually were but at least it was a nice showing of variety that Chrono Trigger offers. Alas, its still my least favorite for how it is more of a chore, and it being piss easy when you equip your friends with some of that Fire Resist and even Fire Absorb gear.

Son of the Sun can be frustratingly hard or laughably easy. Ruby Armor is the key for survival in that fight.

I'm gonna talk a bit about The Evil Within. One of my favorite games for PS4 and possibly my favorite horror game of all time. On boss battles, this game presents the most creative fights out of all of them. However, everything that's good, has its... bad side.

I hate the Sadist.

People who played this game will think "dude what the hell, The Keeper is even worse" No. The Keeper is original and creative, while The Sadist is your everyday chainsaw-wielding Zombie that is slightly stronger than the others. The Sadist is the very first enemy you find in the game. You find him chopping up some corpses with a meat cleaver. He then goes into the other room. You grab a knife and take some keys to unlock a door. You go up the door and think everything is fine, until you activate a tripwire. He steps into the room with a chainsaw. You run from him through a long hallway, but he gets to you and slashes you in the ankle with his chainsaw. Now, not only is your speed crippled, there's a maniac chasing after you in the depths of a hospice.

But that's not it. On Chapter 3, you find your way into a village in the woods after escaping the hospice. You go through the gate and find one of your friends, a doctor who is trying to find his mentally unstable patient. He says that the patient went through a gate, but right after he says this, a zombie closes the gate. He says he'll distract the zombies so you go ahead and open the gate. Going to the gate, you see there is no clear way of opening it aside from cutting apart a giant chain that keeps the gate down. But the chain is too big, and you know what's gonna cut it? That's right. A chainsaw.

You go near the barn and hear some growling. Such growling that comes from something that is very irritated. You go up on the barn's second floor and find out that the Sadist is chained behind a wooden wall. Now, to face this guy, you have to be prepared. Really prepared. If you don't get the shotgun or the crossbow, you are going to more than definitely die. Power up both the shotgun and the crossbow, then go up to the second floor of the barn and shoot the Sadist with a small handgun's shot. He is set free from the chains, as he grabs the chainsaw and tears through the wooden wall. The first thing he does is climb up the stairs and run towards you. You have two choices: Stand there and shoot the monster down, or run for your life around the village until you kill it. And the worst is, you can't even use his chainsaw after you cut the chain! It just disappears from your inventory.

kof bosses from '98 omega rugal onwards... they're a trope of their own, those bastards!