Cheapest boss in a game

jonnybadd

I just started playing Street Fighter 3 again and had forgotten how cheap the last boss Gill can be. So Frustrating! Another contender would be the last boss from DoA4 on Time Attack mode.

Any other ridiculously frustrating and cheap bosses?

evad_lhorg

yea Gill is a git. as it the hitomi look alike thing from doa4.

Jinpachi from tekken 5 as well.

Zapp Brannigan

Cheap?

If we're talking hard bosses then M Bison in SFA 3, is a right coont.

CiDeRmAn

R-type 2, just pick one, almost any of them, used to drive me nuts.

awhir

ninja gadien *cough

Creature

Yeah Bison from SFA3 is a cheap git. That Psycho Crusher he does is a total **** to block, and it's completely unavoidable unless you teleport around it using one of the characters capable of doing that.
Also I'd say pretty much any King of Fighters boss ever.

Retr0gamer

Fire Lord Leo from Viewtiful Joe was particularly tough. Never found Ninja Gaiden as tough as most people make it out to be. Xbox gamers are wussies M Bison can be an awful cheap git at the best of times.

Every boss in Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou after the first level is extremely cheap. Dodonpachi was sheer genius but they really ruined that game by making it stupidly hard and frustrating.

However the cheapest boss ever has to be the last boss of Dynamite Headdy. It's completely based on luck if you beat that boss or not. The worst thing was that the game is unbelievably tough and took about 4 hours to get to the last boss. I used to get so frustrated by him since you would get all the way to the end only to lose all your lives on an unfair boss and none of the lost lives were your fault.

I find many of the bosses in American made action games such as third and first person shooters to be both awful and cheap at the same time. They just don't seem to know how to do them well, it's like Metroid Prime never happened.

BlitzKrieg

what do we mean by cheap?

cause when someone says cheap boss to me, i think of the recent shadow the hedgehog where it had supposable 10 different routes through the game, yet in 6 of those routes you fight the same crappy boss despite the choices you make during the game (example, you actually choose to defend this boss against an attack, then turn around for no reason to fight him in the boss section.)

how bloody cheap.

Trode

I don't know if it's cheap as such, but the level 3 boss on Ikaruga really bugs me. I can get to the fecker without losing a life, yet it takes me usually 1 or 2 continues to beat him.
And who was that boss in FF6(I think, one of them anyway) who always killed your entire party with his dying attack, so the only way to beat him was to have a character with some sort of auto-resurrection state at the end? Now that was cheap.

Retr0gamer

Trode wrote:

I don't know if it's cheap as such, but the level 3 boss on Ikaruga really bugs me. I can get to the fecker without losing a life, yet it takes me usually 1 or 2 continues to beat him.
And who was that boss in FF6(I think, one of them anyway) who always killed your entire party with his dying attack, so the only way to beat him was to have a character with some sort of auto-resurrection state at the end? Now that was cheap.

Ikarugas level 3 boss isn't that tough with practice. Ikaruga is never cheap, it's just tough and every part of that game is beatable with enough skill and practice. A cheap boss is one that relies on more luck than anything or is an impenetrable wall until you level up.
That FF6 boss was an optional boss so you can forgive it for being so tough. It was a bit nasty that you had to make your way up the whole tower again when you found out about that dirty cheap attack.
RPGs have many cheap bosses. The end boss of Xenosaga and FFX were impossible if you didn't waste your life levelling up before hand. However the cheapest was the last boss of FF9. Unless you are at extremely high levels beating this boss is purely down to luck. His attacks are way over powered and he seems to cut in on your moves even if you clearly attacked first. I've beaten him at about lvl 45 but had just as much trouble doing it the second time through with lvl 60 characters.

evad_lhorg

trode if you cant beat ikaruga just sell it to me.

Trode

evad_lhorg wrote:

trode if you cant beat ikaruga just sell it to me.

Not for all the tea in China, my friend. I love that game.
And it's not that I can't get past him, it's just that it seems like a steep difficulty spike. Even the level 4 boss gives me less trouble. As Retr0gamer said though, it's probably just a case of more practice.

Retr0gamer

I find the 4th level boss more difficult. The level 3 boss is a case for following a pattern and not getting tunnel vision when he speeds up spinning.

The Mortal Kombat games usually had very cheap bosses. Kintaro and Shao Khan from MK2 and the last boss of MK3 were stupidly tough. I've never beaten that game on a decent difficulty with 1 credit.

CiDeRmAn

The cheapest bosses could also be the ones that simply lack any impacy at all, spoiling what should be a pivotal moment in a game with such easiness that it beggars belief, for that I nominate pretty much every boss in Quake4 and Prey, what were they thinking and for the baddest git I nominate the final bastard in Metroid Prime.

Zombrex

"Cheap" ... is this some new slang from "da kids" that I'm just not down with because I'm old (27 :eek:)

Does cheap mean

- hard to beat?
- easy to beat?
- CPU cheats to beat you?
- looks crap?
- stupid character?

Help out an old timer would ya ...

evad_lhorg

where you could be kicking the bosses ass and their energy could be gone and BAM they pull off an impossible comeback that almost feels like the computer is cheating you.

I didnt find metroid prime to be hard really. beat it on second go If I remember rightly and probably would have done it first time if I hadve known there was a save point underground after the Ridley fight:(

Retr0gamer

A definition for a cheap boss is one that is overly frustrating and annoying due to requiring little skill to but just mountains of luck, such as a boss that requires you to quicksave constantly to beat or one that you only stand a chance against if it pulls off it's softest attack patterns more often.

This definition kind of changes for bosses in RPGs and 1 on 1 fighters. In RPGs a cheap boss would be one that is impossible to beat unless you do some levelling up thus prolonging the game. Arcade 1v1 fighters are designed to gobble your change so usually have a very difficult last boss who has the advantage or a huge set of moves, being very fast, having cheesy moves and a whole set of other annoyances.

As for Metroid Prime, I didn't find it hard but the bosses were fantastic and far from cheesy. A good boss should have attacks that are all avoidable but it takes a lot of skill to do so.

johnny_ultimate

The final boss in God of War p'd me right off. Left a bad taste in my mouth after the excellence of the rest of the game.
And that Underwater Weapon fellow from FF7. If you happened to miss the materia you could get at one point in the game only, it was rendered impossible. And even if you had magical underwater materia, any character under Level 90 was doomed from the off.

Jazzy

emerald weapon was easy enough as far as secret bosses go imo.


now Sephiroth from Kingdom Hearts.... there is the king of unfair right there

K.O.Kiki

The final boss from FFIX wasn't too hard -- just hit him a couple hundred times with Freya's maxed-out Dragon's Crest for 9999 damage each turn
And, um... hope he doesn't kill Freya... yeah... he was kinda cheap (and boring, too)
*edit* mind you -- IIRC I was at Lv. 75+...

Let's not forget the one of the first cheap beat-em-up bosses -- Super SFII Turbo Akuma, he with the uncounterable airborne fireballs!
Although I can't remember if he was consistently cheap, I only got to fight him once... then I cried a bit...

Man I really hope they have one of the proper Mishimas back as a boss in Tekken 6. Jinpachi is so cheap -- setup into unescapeable stun while I'm lying on the ground? Double fireballs while I'm close? AAARGH!!

bugs

I don't think i've ever come across a cheap boss in a fighting game. At best they're just setup extremely hard.
For example, jinpatchi is hardly cheap. Nothing he throws at you is particularily hard to avoid, the fireball, the stun dash, maybe the first 2 play throughs but any of these games from tekken to KOF can be easily beaten from start to finish if you have a good grasp of the game mechanics.
Some of the bosses bend the rules of the game and can probably only be beaten by over use of particular attacks or techs (goro in MK) which could probably be called cheap.
Anyone who plays the multiplayer in fighting games to a decent degree will usually walk all over the cpu.

I would have said any boss that does something which is entirely unavoidable despite anything you could do is cheap. And even then, theres probably someone out there whos better at that particular genre of game who will just tell you to practice more.

Sgt. Politeness

Alpha152 in DOA4 is completely cheap. The constant teleporting, the face blast thing that takes 3/4 of your energy...she absoutely RUINED that game for me

Ho-Hum

One boss batlle that really annoyed me was in Viewtiful Joe when you have to fight 4 bosses you have already beaten indivually in a row. It can get extremely frustrating.

johnny_ultimate

Yeah multiple boss fights are really extremely irritating. Ive fought them already, not again please! If i remember correctly I didnt think the Viewtiful Joe one was too bad, but the ones in Treasure 2D side scrollers still give me nightmares

Retr0gamer

johnny_ultimate wrote:

Yeah multiple boss fights are really extremely irritating. Ive fought them already, not again please! If i remember correctly I didnt think the Viewtiful Joe one was too bad, but the ones in Treasure 2D side scrollers still give me nightmares

Treasure never had a boss rush of old enemies in any of their games. The bad guys came back at the end of Gunstar Heroes and Gunstar Super Heroes but they were completely different boss fights. The boss rush of previous bosses is actually a tradition of Capcom that started with Megaman 1 and is normally found in all their games. The only other games that do it are in one of the gradius games and somtimes in side scrolling beat'em ups (a genre perfected by capcom with Final Fight and the template was just copied by games like Streets of Rage). Konami have their code, maoi heads and constant references/lampooning of other Konami games, Capcom have their Boss Rush before the end of the game

Never found boss rushes all that bad. You were usually so powered up that they didn't stand a chance by the end. Even in Megaman it was just a case of finding each bosses weakness and fighting weak bosses after a particularly tough fight. The one in DMC3 did get on my nerves because Cerberus was still very tough at the end of the game. At least you could skip him in DMC3 and finish it in 3 boss fights.Strange thing was that Cerberus was the toughest boss in that game and also the hardest. Reminds me of Ninja Gaidens 'baptism of fire' first boss

Squall

Reminds me of Ninja Gaidens 'baptism of fire' first boss

Ya he was a pain when youve only been playing the game for an hour or so.

You go in all psyched up ready to kick his ass then BAM...... wtf?

It took me at least 15 or so trys to beat him. On the plus side.... it was great training for the rest of the game.

Retr0gamer

It was just a case of having patience and getting only the minium amount of attacks on him so he couldn't counter. Almost every other boss in the game was like that.

B00MSTICK

Some of the later opponents in Super Punchout were downright dirty . Once you got their attack patterns and animations down it gets easier but still damn tough.

regeneration

I remember giving up with Final Fantasy 8 because one of the last bosses (in the game) involved your team being picked at random, so you had no realistic way of making sure you had a strong team to face it. So unless you spent hours maxing out the stats on every character in your team & equiping them with the strongest materials, I would get nobbled in the endfight with an already very tough boss

Mind you I haven't played it since then so it could have been teenage wussiness. FF7 had a nice learning curve, least it felt you could beat the end bosses there (bar 1 or 2 exceptions)

sAid

evad_lhorg wrote:

Jinpachi from tekken 5 as well.

agreed

Giblet

jonnybadd wrote:

I just started playing Street Fighter 3 again and had forgotten how cheap the last boss Gill can be. So Frustrating! Another contender would be the last boss from DoA4 on Time Attack mode.

Any other ridiculously frustrating and cheap bosses?

Holy crap, I read the title and thought "Gil". Weird that it was the first post