Games with Awesome Boss Battles

[II Scarecrow II]

Not many of the games I play nowadays have boss fights in the traditional sense, but waaaaay back on the N64, Lylat Wars, Banjo Kazooie and Mischief Makers all had pretty hardcore bosses.

Unfortunately in my experience, most boss battles nowadays boil down to "shoot/stab/blow up the glowing bit." I don't know if that is different in any of the games listed above, but it kinda takes some of the challenge out of it.

NOTE: Portal/Portal to excpeted from the previous paragraph. That game had a very interesting boss battle Nothing like a TIMED PHYSICS PUZZLE to get the adrenaline pumping!! I'm a sad person aren't I....

 

[The Wykydtron]

Dark Souls? They are quite well designed... And difficult don't forget that.

Except the Gaping Dragon for some reason, fucking easiest boss in the game. Piss easy charge attack, obvious tail whip, high damage i assume. If it ever got close enough to smack me with it's ribcage teeth things. It's like they forgot to make the impressive looking wtf is that dragon thing actually live up to it's awesome appearance. When you're running around in full heavy armour and you're trolololing around the boss... I don't know, maybe it's pentance for the Bell Gargoyles?

Then there be Blighttown... Fuck you! You piece of shit! x1000000 and that's all I have to say on the matter.

 

[Arqus_Zed]

Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call had some great ones: the fiends, the Moirae Sisters, the guardians of the three temples, every boss in the final area...

Also, the original Spyro The Dragon trilogy. Sure, maybe they weren't all that epic and grand, but I still find bosses like Toasty, Ripto and "The Monster To End All Monsters" to be pretty awesome.

 

[dimensional]

Theres a few that always spring to mind most notably

Orochi in Okami as mentioned a few times already even if it is repeated a few times to many

FFVII especially emerald and ruby weapon truly epic fights when you first face them.

Dizzy Devil in Buster busts loose - Probably one of my favourite boss fights, I would play the game just for this fight you have to feed him until he falls asleep sounds boring but was great unfortunately most of the other bosses in it were rubbish.

First flying colossi in shadow of the colossus - easily my favourite fight in the game but the whole game is just awesome boss battles.

Metal Slug series has always provided brilliant boss battles (although I havent played them all)

Devil may cry - the original game had the best bosses in the series made even greater by Dantes stupid quotes.

Gunstar heroes again the game just had fantastic and imaginative boss fights throughout.

Rez these boss fights were something to behold absolutely beautiful and very different its just a shame I was never good enough to finish the last stage.

The demo for Asuras Wrath made it look like that may join my list of games with awesome boss fights if they can keep up the fun but ridiculous fights already shown.

 

[teknoarcanist]

The MGS series has always had fantastic fucking boss battles. Almost every one is the kind of thing where you want to hold it up to other designers like "THIS IS HOW YOU FUCKING DO THIS."

They're rich, they're multi-layered, there are eight different ways you can do every one -- rather than shoehorn you through a specific scripted experience, it's like Kojima went, "Okay. This is this boss character. These are his objectives. This is how he acts. This is how he responds to X, Y, and Z. Here's the environment; here's how it helps you achieve your objective, here's how it deters you. Here's some interesting environmental doohickies that do neat things if you do X to them."

The Fury in MGS3 is one of the better boss battles I've ever played, period.

 

[Legomaniac91_v1legacy]

The fight against Stalord in Twilight Princess was a pretty fun fight. There are a couple of bosses in the Golden Sun series that are pretty cool. I also enjoyed the fight with Ninetails from Okami. Awesome music, a dark atmosphere, and the fact that Ninetails was essentially a twisted mockery of Amaterasu and the brush gods added a degree of unease to the battle.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Third person hack-n-slash type games. Zelda, God of War, Bayonetta, Shadow of the Colossus and other such games.

terraria, have you seen the shit they throw at you?

I have to agree based almost entirely on the Wall of Flesh. That thing is goddamned huge and unnerving.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Zelda games - accept no substitutes. Other than that, Super Metroid had some pretty memorable ones, as did Witcher 2. Unlike Zelda, those games don't fuck around boss-wise - if you miss a shot on Crocomire, he's going to gain an absurd amount of ground on you, if you get hit by Letho's Aard spell, he's going to spam firebombs while you're getting up, and so on.

 

[TheOneBearded]

The ones from Batman:Arkham City. The battle with Grundy was amazing and the one with Freeze was extremely tense, but my favorite has to be the one with Ra's al Ghul.

My least favorite boss battle is the one with Fontaine from Bioshock - the sheer personification of a useless addition to a game (which is why the sequel went with waves of tough enemies in the end instead of one main bad guy).

 

[Zen Toombs]

Well, the Greene boss fight looked like it would be awesome.

An hour or two later, it was... less so.

 

[Frozengale]

JRPGs in general have the best boss battles. They are epic, long, and the bosses are huge.

All three of these do not a good boss battle make.
They can be parts of good boss battles, but none of these are required for a good boss battle.

Long is the first one that makes me cringe. Why does a good boss battle have to be long? Some of the most exhilarating moments in a game can happen in the space of a couple minutes. Long to me means tedious and boring, drawn out. Yes a good boss battle can be long, but due to the restraints in games long will more than likely result in tedious and repetitive.

Huge... why huge... whenever I played the Megaman games I always feared the small bosses. They were fast, agile, and usually could pull of some devastating move that could take away half your half. It always seemed the smaller the opponent the harder it was to deal with. Less telegraphing, faster moves, harder to hit. In some of the games you actually started off killing Giant 10 Story tall robots, and they were piss easy, and not all that fun. Huge doesn't mean good.

And finally epic... I think the blatant mis-usage of this word has become a big problem, people don't know what it really means anymore. Sure the definition of the word could be evolving but I think if that is the case then it is in some sort of limbo where no one knows what it really means. I will use the original definition.
1.
noting or pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style: Homer's Iliad is an epic poem.
2.
resembling or suggesting such poetry: an epic novel on the founding of the country.
3.
heroic; majestic; impressively great: the epic events of the war.
4.
of unusually great size or extent: a crime wave of epic proportions.

A boss battle does not have to be heroic or majestic to be good. It can be down right ugly and depressing. I can't think of a good example right now, but I know they exist.

 

[OpiateChicken]

Golden Sun 1 & 2
Halo 2 (Brute Chieftan)
Super Mario World (Bowser in his little floating thing)
Pokemon: Blue Version
Ocarina of Time (Ganondorf/Ganon was much more badass than Majora)
that being said, Majora's Mask (the twin bosses in Ikana Canyon)
Mass Effect 1
Super Smash Bros. (Master Hand)
NHL Hitz 2002 (the last team you have to play to win the Midway Cup is hard as fuck)

 

[Hylke Langhout]

I am disappoint Escapist. How could you forget Doom and Duke Nukem 3D? Catherine's final boss level is tense as FUCK. Also, if I may make a prediction I would say that Asura's Wrath will have amazingly ridiculous boss battles.

 

[Ignatz_Zwakh]

Bayonetta. I wasn't crazy about the game overall, but fuck were those epic fights.

 

[Asclepion]

Einhander.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Bayonetta had some fucking SWEET boss battles that took up entire levels, were tough and challenging but never unfair, and fucking varied as hell and ALWAYS fun to replay through. AND mid-boss checkpoints. Thank God for mid-boss checkpoints.

Ditto, the boss Fortitudo is my favourite. Being able to reverse time is what makes it fun for me.

Final Fantasy 8 had some good boss fights. Omega was a toughie, but I loved it.

 

[Monkeybald]

Mischief Makers had some pretty intense boss battles. Winning them took a hell of an effort for me.

Also, I love the intros to them. EDIT: (THROUGH FIRE, JUSTICE IS SERVED!... CERBERUS ALPHA!)

 

[Jingle Fett]

The old Rare games from the N64 had some pretty epic boss battles...
-Final battle with Grunty in Banjo-Kazooie
-The bosses from DK64
-THE GREAT MIGHTY POO
->Nothing is more awesome than fighting a singing ball of shit

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

If I vote for the new Deus Ex game, Human Revolution, will I be scolded out of the forums now?

The problem most people had with those fights wasn't that they couldn't be skipped over. It was that they are unbalanced and un-neccesary. "Fleshman" (?) had a plasma rifle that could very nearly insta-kill you. Yet when you use the exact weapon, it is barely stronger than the assault rifle.

 

[shurikenshado4]

The ones in Vanquish. They'll show you where the weakness is but even then, its still really tough to kill the bosses (Totally trolling. I love it)