I played Minecraft for over a decade before I bothered going to beat the Ender Dragon
Ugh. My friends and I recently played through “V Rising” . It’s a good game. It’s like Valheim meets Diablo but you’re vampires… Because of our busy adult lives we played together once a week for usually 2-3 hours. It’s took us damn near a year to get to the final boss, and it was just wipe after wipe after wipe. We weren’t making any progress. Like we couldn’t get him down past 75% life no matter how hard we tried. We changed our skills and equipment, same thing. We looked up some guides online and they were basically like “git good”
We never beat him, because we didn’t want to waste any more of our limited adult gaming time just getting crushed by a boss for hours.
It was such a slap in the face because nothing else in the game was that difficult. There were some tough bosses that took us down maybe 3 or 4 times. But this was just hours of getting wrecked without even getting close to winning. It was truly a morale blow.
Sigh… We switched to a different game, and I guess we will just never finish that one.
The orphan of Kos in Bloodborne. Could never quite get it right, got so close several times but even with help that crazy bastard is just soo fast and difficult to predict. I tried for like a week, 30 or more goes. It really annoys me because Bloodborne is my favourite souls game.
Malileth, the black blade in Eden Ring.
I eventually had to summon co-op players in and just sit in the corner and let them do the work. Fuck that boss…
Well that kinda takes the wind outta my sails for completing the game. I’m kinda stuck at the forge of the giants. And I’m so late that there’s hardly ever coop signs around
I think at a certain point, a break from the game is warranted before going back in to grind and be specced correctly for a difficult area/boss
I’ve found that sometimes I come back to a game after a long break and end up better at it than I previously was. Like I’ll dread parts that were difficult the last time and then breeze through them when I get there.
Like I was stuck on some room in Doom Eternal, it just kept kicking my ass until I gave up on the game for like a year. I tried resuming the game, realized I couldn’t remember all the controls and decided to start over again and then didn’t even notice when I got back to that room because I cleared it easily and continued on.
I’m not sure if it’s because the other games I’d played in the meantme helped me develop my skills more, if my subconscious optimized the skills I retained from the first playthrough, or if I just avoided picking up some bad habits I had the first time that made things harder for me.
I have this really old save file on Mario & Luigi Partners in Time where I basically tried to skip combat as much as possible, and it took me like 5 years to reach the final boss (compared to like two weeks on the other save).
Its been stuck there on the Shroob finale because it legitimately takes you like 40 minutes to clear the first princess and you have basically no one-ups or a useful amount of bros items, so you have to make every hit and dodge count.
I’ve seen several good speed runs of the game so it’s definitely doable, but it requires about 2 hours of perfect inputs, so I probably won’t be finishing it soon lol.
I’m going to say pretty much every fight in Sifu. People praise it as having some of the best fighting combat and claim that it just takes a while to learn, but I put weeks of time into that game and it never got any easier. I managed to get past the first two levels before hitting a wall I could just not get past.
Oh man, I loved Sifu! I’d recently finished Sekiro and thought “well it can’t be harder than that”. Ultimately, it wasn’t but it took a long time to get the hang of the different combat rhythm.
Starfox adventure final space boss. After taking months adventuring my way through the game the space fight suddenly ramped up. Had no idea how to beat him.
Friend came over barreled rolled instintvly (I had never played the originals). Blew my mind.
Pokemon ZA Zygarde has been kicking my ass. Usually I’m the one who dies while my pokemon are just fine.
Still haven’t gotten past RoboPres in Destroy All Humans
Destroy all humans combat could hit you out of no where!
Ikaruga.
Not necessarily for any particular boss - but I enjoy shmups (Gradius, Thunder Force, Gaiares) and getting anything other than a “c” on a level is work. I’ve even seen videos of people 2 sticking the game (playing both players at once) and getting S on levels…
Ruby Weapon in the Final Fantasy VII PS1 game.
I even followed the guide, so I just couldn’t figure it out.
The amount of grinding necessary to beat all of the Weapons was ridiculous. I got tired of trying.
It’s infuriating to see videos of people that have figured out the exact materia combos to beat it in under 5 minutes
The jousting boss in Luigi 's Mansion 2. Guy was a jerk!
The final T-Rex in “Chuck Rock”
I’m parked about halfway through Returnal. It’s so punishing I just resent the time I need to put in to git gud.
Final Fantasy X. Technically last boss has some auto-win thing to it, but the one before that is a tough challenge.
What killed it for me is, the one just before was very technical. There’s a shifting elemental stance that you can come up with counter strategies to, and it felt like a well thought victory.
But the final boss? WHAM, huge damage. And again, HUGE DAMAGE. It became a numbers check, and I didn’t feel like grinding to keep up, so I watched the ending on YouTube.
On the flip side, doing even just a couple of side quests will quickly over level you, making all the end bosses trivial.
Honestly, the hardest story boss is probably the Seymour fight on Mount Gagazet. You’re less likely to be overleveled at that point and it introduces some mechanics for the first time that you likely aren’t prepared for.
