My Top 5 Most Hated Types Of Boss Fight

Boss fights. I personally love them. They test you on what you've learned so far. They can be bombastic, brutal, tense and just plain fun.
However, there are some types of boss fights that are plain dull and test nothing but your patience and sanity.
And today, I'm going to list, in no particular, my five most hated types of boss fight. Let's get started.

1. The Adds Boss
This is potentially one of the most irritating types of boss fights out there. To clarify for anyone scratching their head, Adds are additional enemies that spawn in with or after the boss fight starts.
The problem here should be pretty obvious. You're trying to fight this big bad (although probably not, considering the adds even existing) boss, and you're constantly getting knocked about by these little buggers, and chances are, they'll stop you from escaping the boss's attack or just whittle you down until a sneeze could kill you. And usually, if you couldn't tell from my last sentence, they are far more of a threat than the boss itself and after killing them all, the boss just becomes trivial.
A good example of the use of this terrible boss fight is Dark Souls 2, a game that seems to be enamoured with it. You see, off the top of my head, there are three bosses that are guilty of it;

• Royal Rat Vanguard: This fight puts you in a room of constantly spawning giant rats, and the actual boss is a rat, that looks and behaves exactly the same as all the others, so you pretty much have to guess correctly or waste time, items and possibly braincells wading through a sea of rats.
• Royal Rat Authority: This, this i just hated. Giant Rat monster than spawns in with three smaller rats that apply poison to you. The think is, those smaller rats are by far and away more threatening than the massive one. the poison shreds your health, not to mention their own attacks chunk you. And once you kill them (likely on your third or fourth try), the big on is pitiful. Slow and declares all of its attacks way before actually attacking.
• Duke's Dear Freja: Another example of a near trivial boss once the adds are out of the picture. Only thing that makes this laser firing spider worse than RRA is that her adds respawn.

Would also like to say that add battles can be done well. For example, Mistral from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Throughout the fight there are small tripod robots that pester you, however, they do very little damage, are killed in one or two hits, and Mistral is always the largest threat to you.

2. QTE/Mash Boss
Now, this should be something close to everyone's heart. The boss fights that require you to either, as the trope says, 'Press X Not To Die' or nigh on snap your controller in half to win. And if you fail? Well, best case scenario (if you can even call it that), you just get sent back to just before you failed the prompt. Worst case? You start the entire boss fight again.
The entire fight.
For missing one button.
...
MY BOSS FIGHT FOR A BUTTON!
Now, they don't have to be solely QTEs or mashes, but dear Lord when it pops up it you'd better be prepared to break your hand or your controller.
I hope everyone saw this example coming. The modern Resident Evil games. And now, for the most obvious ones. To me at the very least;

• Resident Evil 4, the first encounter with Krauser: This is starts as the biggest and hopefully unintentional troll I've seen in a game. cutscene starts and then mere seconds later a prompt flashes on scene and then you die. And then you try again. You get the prompt and then go on to engage in two and a half minutes of 'Press X Not To Die'. Then Krauser more or less sods off until his longer and somehow more annoying boss fight.
• Resident Evil 5, the final fight with Wesker: You know something? **** this fight. I have simultaneously cramped my hand and blistered my fingers because of this QTE and Mash ridden hell hole. When playing as Chris, you get to enjoy a nice bit of alone time, beating the ever loving crap out of boulder, because who the hell has ever heard of pushing? And as Sheva...as Sheva you get to mash a button to pull yourself up from a cliff over lava for what feels like eternity, whilst Wesker attempts to shoot you off (and one shot hitting you signals game over). And it's never. ****ING. ENOUGH. I have tried to do it so many times, and every time I have had to stop because otherwise I fear my hand would fall off.

That being said, QTE bosses have been done well. Metal Gear Rising (oh look, another good example from this game. Fancy that.) handles QTEs and Mashing well because A. you don't feel like you're hurting yourself trying to do them, and B. whatever is going on on screen at the time is probably the most ridiculously over the top, nonsensical action that you almost forget how much you hate QTEs.

3. Timed Boss
OK, this should be obvious. Any boss fight that the game forces you to beat in a set time, lest you get paid a visit by crazy old uncle GAME OVER. This is made even more aggravating when most of the time timed bosses have some way of prolonging the fight. Popular choices being healing themselves, greatly increasing their resistances or just plain becoming invincible.
And on to the examples.

• Eidolons and several bosses from Final Fantasy XIII: Right, so Doom has always been a staple 'screw you' in Final Fantasy. The game counts down how long a party member had left before they die. While this is annoying, you can probably just revive them, right? Hahahaaaa. Not in XIII. Doom is cast of the team party leader, meaning you. The issue there is that due to XIII's stupid combat system, if you die, regardless of if your party is still alive, it's game over, and you have to start the fight again. The Eidolons Doom you instantly, but fortunately, the other bosses wait until the fight has dragged on 20 minutes (which happened way more than I care to admit) before deciding to hurry you up.
• Dark Samus from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: So, you kill another boss, and then get told you have to escape the Dark Dimension before it collapses. OK, no problem. That is, until Dark Samus turns up and blocks your path. Sure, I can handle this. Wait, why do my attacks bounce off of her? Why did she go invisible? Why does she have an impenetrable barrier? That's right, most of this boss is stalling tactics, that I'm certain were designed to throw you off your game in frustration as the clock ticks down.

As always, there is an example of a timed boss being done well. And I still can't believe it's from Resident Evil 5. The first time you face Wesker, when he says the immortal line, "Seven minutes. Seven minutes is all I can spare to play with you." You then have, you guessed it, seven minutes to beat him. However, and here's what I love about this, there is no punishment for not beating him. Game goes on as usual, no game over. Personally, I wish every fight with the main bad guy outside of the final fight worked like this.

4. The Elusive Weakpoint or 'Wait For It' Boss
You know those bosses in games that have extremely obvious weakpoints that scream what they are with ill deserved pride? Well, these are bosses that have those, but seem far more shy about sharing them. You will spend ages waiting to be able to hit them, either because the boss take no damage from not hitting them, or they take so little damage you might as well just wait.

• Mogenar from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: OK, big guy that has four massive red orbs on his body. You know what to do. That's right, wait for him to reveal them for long enough for you to actually get enough damage down. That's no fun. That's tedious. That's like playing Whack-A-Mole where the moles only pop up every minute or so.
• Uroboros Aheri (Excella Gionne) from Resident Evil 5: There you go, RE5. Back where I expect you to be. Must like Mogenar, you can only hit the weakpoints every so often. The difference is twofold. 1. The waiting is caused by the Laser Designator for the random satellite laser needing to recharge after every shot, and 2. while you can do damage without the laser, you do so little damage its not even worth doing.

...What? Oh, you're waiting for an example of this being done well, huh? Tough. I have never once seen this done well. Never.

5. The Instakill Boss
Now, this should be obvious. It's when the boss has a move or combo or whatever, that, when it lands, will kill you outright. I honestly don't think I need to tell you why I hate these bosses. But I will sum it up with one line;
'What's it doiand I'm dead. Fan-****ing-tastic.'

• Dhurlga from Resident Evil (my God, this series is on here all the time) Revelations 2: Now, there is something that really irks me about this one's instakill. It feels really cheap. It has a tell, where it walks forwards making weird noises, then just when you think its done it charges forwards, catching Barry if he's not carefully and just, well, killing him.
• Pretty much every boss from The Evil Within: Why? Why give every boss an instakill? What possible reason? Reborn Laura (Creepy Spider Lady)? Her most common attack is an instakill move. The Keeper (Safe Man)? Instakill. Amalgam (Weird Fleshy Monster)? You better believe he#s got one too.

Again, no. Never done well from what I've seen. How could they? It's either going to be an attack that'll be hard to counter or so easy to counter that they might as well have not put it in.

And there we have it. My Most Hated Boss Fight Types. Hope you enjoyed my ramblings.

TL;DR: I have way too much free time on my hands.

 

Nice post

Then you mentioned Mogenar from Prime 3 and you gave me bad memories
Actually I think I could name quite a few bosses from the Metroid Prime games. No wonder I like them so much

Excluding that I know a good one for some of the old PC gamers like myself.
The final boss from Doom 2, ID. It's an evil combination of 1 and 4. He spawns his little minions to knock you off the platform forcing you to get back on it and realign your rocket shots. Takes about 3 or 4 shots to the small hole that's supposed to be his brain.

Of course you could cheat and use freelook aiming with the mouse but keep in mind the game wasn't designed for mouselooking at the time.

 

I decided to look back a bit and I found this. I agree with you on this, those frustrating, stupid fights. Here is one that is particularly annoying: boss fight is just a cutscene in which the player defeats the boss. You mow down an army of enemies to reach the boss, then the cutscene finishes it all off right when you get to the good part. Too easy. It's actually anti-climatic.

 

Number 5 two of them come to mind.

Remember that boss from Final Fantasy X? Mentioning the name is probably a spoiler so I'll say it below

Spoiler

Yunalesca I think was her name. You had to do something regarding the Zombie status otherwise she has this move that intakills you. It's completely cheap because there is ZERO CHANCE you could know about this going in. I hate bosses like that.

Also in the same mold, Skies of Arcadia had some final bosses with the instant kill move. Basically stuff like this comes down to fervant praying to your RNG god of choice.

You should add another one. The self healing bosses. That stupid turtle from Skies of Arcadia!

 

I remember Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance having a healing boss. Thing was, if you attacked, he would just keep on healing. So you just had to watch him as he healed. Not that it really bothered me, since he was not the type to do a full healing if left untouched.

 

Ah, you're talking about Armstrong. Fun fact, he has a weak point on his back that if you used Zandatsu on, he'd stop healing instantly.

@Doomguy I would add a self healing bosses section, but I can not for the life of me think of any bosses I've faced that have truly egregious levels of self healing.