Maybe it should’ve been “Bottom 10“, eh?
Regardless, I’ve done a bunch of different articles about boss fights in video games here at The Contrarian Corner. I’m a huge sucker for awesome boss battles, and I love talking about them. But, I also enjoy engaging in (from time-to-time) talking about things I don’t like! So let’s combine those two ideas and talk about some of the worst bosses in video games!
Also, these bosses are specifically ones that I’ve beaten in games that I’ve played. I know worse ones exist out there! Also also, you can bet there’s tons of other great (or I guess I should say awful) examples that I’m just not thinking of as I write this article!
Let’s get into this list of miserable encounters!
10) Silver Sonic and Death Egg Robot ~ Sonic the Hedgehog 2
So, in an interesting start to this list, this is actually a boss I enjoy quite a bit. It just isn’t very good! And all of its flaws come from the simple fact that you don’t get any rings…at all. That means that a single mistake kills you, and before long you’ll find yourself getting a Game Over…which boots you to the title screen, when you were just at the final boss! It’s not even that it’s super hard, because Silver Sonic follows a set pattern, and Death Egg Robot can’t defeat you if you only attack him at very specific points. It’s just tedious, prolonged, requires way too much merciless muscle-memory training, and the margin for error is entirely too small. Literally even a single ring being provided would’ve totally solved this battle’s issues.
9) King Boo ~ Super Mario Sunshine
This boss is on this list purely because…well…it’s really dumb? Viewed from a certain lens, this boss probably isn’t even worth putting on this list, and yet for some reason it’s a battle that has always stayed in my memory for all the wrong reasons. To win, you have to ground-pound purple buttons until they stop moving, then spray King Boo until he decides to roll the slot machine and spawn fruit, then throw a pepper at him so his tongue gets spicy, then throw a melon at him to actually deal damage. None of this is explained, none of this is hinted at, and this isn’t a mechanic the preceding level utilizes. It breaks just about every Game Development 101 rule, and that’s not even to mention that it’s luck-based! King Boo can roll other slot combinations that just prolong the fight with weak enemy mobs or coins. It’s so annoying how it can take you five minutes, or it can take you twenty!
8) The Bloat ~ The Binding of Isaac
A boss so hated it has an entire subreddit dedicated to hating on it, The Bloat is a rather infamous battle. Yes, since this is The Binding of Isaac, it’s entirely possible to pick up such an insanely good combinations of items that The Bloat dies before he can even blink his detached eyeballs. But sometimes you don’t have a good run, and this boss is a nightmare incarnate. By far, the worst thing about him is how he instantly blasts you with his lasers the second the fight begins. I kid you not, if you don’t move the split-second you’re first able to, you will take unavoidable damage. It’s absurdly anti-player design that boggles my mind to this day. And then even just on top of that, The Bloat has a bloated health bar and way too many annoying moves (like the ability to fire lasers below him and to the sides, severely limiting the places you can even stand to fight him). You never wanna see this guy show up.
7) Khezu ~ Monster Hunter Series
There’s a lot I could say about how unfun it is to fight Khezu. I could mention how his piercing scream is loud and grating, and he does it all the time. I could mention how he inflicts you with the Electrified debuff that can leave you paralyzed and more susceptible to being stunned. I could mention how gross he looks. I could mention how he wastes time crawling on ceilings, or using his ‘get off me‘ discharge move to prolong an already too-long fight. Or, I could simply point out that the Monster Hunter series is known for a lot of things, and one of the biggest factors in these games are their soundtracks. And Khezu? He has no soundtrack at all. None. It’s pure musical silence when you fight him. Do you know how boring and soulsucking that is? No one enjoys fighting this guy, no one ever has fun when they’re forced to tackle this unsightly creature, and yet Capcom just keeps bringing him back in nearly every single installment for unfathomable reasons. I can’t wrap my head around it, other than assuming they just like to see us players suffer!
6) Divine Dragon ~ Sekiro
This boss fight really rubbed me the wrong way during my playthrough of Sekiro, and I think my opinion has only soured seeing how many other people somehow enjoy it. It’s a big spectacle fight that’s meant to be flashy and anime-esque, which is totally fine if either it had focused on Quick-Time-Events, or if Sekiro was a game capable of having big-scale showdowns. This battle achieves neither goal, resulting in a mindless phase one where you mash buttons until you win, and a second phase that completely flips the script with nigh-undodgeable attacks and ludicrous patterns that can kill you in one or two shots, forcing you to endure a lengthy runback to the boss and that grindy phase one again! It’s such a huge fumble, turning what is supposed to be an epic moment in the story into a chore I just wanted to finish and never have to return to again…a sentiment much of Sekiro evokes, actually.
5) Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy ~ Elden Ring
This is probably the most controversial pick on this list, but I truly dislike this boss quite immensely. A lot of it stems from how little I enjoy boss fights that introduce an entirely new gimmick and force you to use exclusively that gimmick for the fight. A boss should test my knowledge of the core gameplay mechanics, not introduce a brand-new ruleset just to mess with me! And Rykard, by requiring you to use the Serpent Hunter weapon, does just that.
But wait, I already hear your question. What about Yhorm from Dark Souls 3, who forces you to use the Stormruler? First, you can have your NPC companion use that weapon instead if you’d like, as Yhorm is perfectly doable without it. Secondly, Yhorm is a three minute fight, not a ten minute slogfest! Across two excruciatingly long phases, Rykard made me want to bash my head into a wall as I died over and over again trying to tango with him while using a weapon I’d never had experience with before. And then the second phase, when he throws in so many attacks my game started to lag as the screen filled up with so many obstacles I couldn’t even see? It’s a miserable encounter.
4) Door Guardian ~ Lies of P
This boss fight unequivocally sucks in basically every way. This boss has no plot relevance, no fanfare, and no associated cutscenes. It’s simply a roadblock placed at the end of a lengthy gauntlet of giant scorpion beasts, invisible assassins, and cannon fire across a multi-minute run through a beach fortress. Which yes, means that if you die to the boss, you have to do that entire run again each time. Seriously, when will we finally move on from the dreaded (and unfun) boss runbacks in these games? It’s terrible to do that each time you die.
And die you will, because the Door Guardian has been designed to be insufferable. Big attacks, big damage, difficult timings for dodging and parrying. And if you get hit? You’ll inflicted with the Shock debuff which makes you move super slow (so you’re almost guaranteed to get hit again). And then he’s a gimmick boss anyway, requiring you to chip away at his ankles (the most dangerous place to be standing given his moveset), so he’ll topple and you can hit his head. Except, get this, his body is a hitbox when he falls over, which means he can damage you (and kill you) by falling on you! It’s a complete surprise in the worst way, being a total ‘get punked‘ moment from the developers that I do not appreciate.
3) Bed of Chaos ~ Dark Souls
Literally no list of Worst Bosses worth its salt neglects to put this showdown on it. I’m not even going to waffle on too long about this fight, because nearly everyone knows how terrible it is (even the creator of Dark Souls itself regrets making this fight). In a game with the most janky movement controls of all time, Bed of Chaos is a platforming battle where one wrong move means instant-death. And when you die? Five minutes to run back to the fight! And you’ll die over and over and over and over in what might be the best representation of the concept of insanity ever conceived by humankind. I think an actual demon might’ve crawled out of the underworld to create this boss, actually, because I truly don’t believe a human being could have been capable of making this, playtesting it, and thinking it was okay.
2) Bahamut Versa Omega ~ Granblue Fantasy Relink
It’s never fun when a boss fight is bad. It’s particularly egregious when it’s an optional bonus fight that you have to work your butt off to unlock that ends up being bad! But that’s exactly what happens here in the battle against Bahamut Versa Omega as the final showdown of the post-game storyline. The big bad lurking at the end of hours upon hours of tackling foes and unraveling the mysteries of the world in this otherwise fantastic action JRPG.
99% of the game plays like a fusion of a Warriors game, Devil May Cry, and Dragalia Lost. The 1% that is this fight? Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. You play as a big dragon, you fight the other big dragon, and you punch each other until someone wins. And by golly, it might just be your opponent, because this battle is tough…for all the wrong reasons. The controls are confusing, this brand-new gameplay style is baffling, everything is really tricky to wrap your head around, and there’s minimal margin for error. It’s not fun, it’s frustrating, it’s aggravating, and it hurts all the more knowing how much you have to work through to get here.
Like…really? I played through all that optional post-game content for this?
1) The Virgin Born ~ Code Vein
I have one thing and one thing only to commend this boss for, and that’s that the soundtrack that plays for this fight is genuinely one of my favorite gaming songs ever. Every other single thing about it is abyssmal.
There’s a lot of sins that a game can commit, but to me, one of the most egregious is having a terrible final boss. I want my games to end on a high note, not the lowest possible note imaginable. And yet, with the exception of going for the Bad Ending route, Code Vein‘s other endings conclude with this showdown that is just miserable in all regards.
Storywise, I have no idea what this thing is, and neither does the game itself. It comes out of nowhere. Designwise it’s fine, I suppose, until you see it in motion and realize how janky and stilted its animations are, almost like it’s an unfinished design that just got shoved into the game to meet a launch date.
But it’s the gameplay that crosses a line. It’s a big beast boss who can only be damaged on his front arms and head. The same arms that swing wildly with every attack. The same head that always hovers just out of reach. Trying to land even a single blow on this creature is an exercise in frustrated futility, as it hops and crawls around, launching attacks that decimate your health bar and quickly send you disintegrating back to the nearest checkpoint, when all you want to do is finish the dang game!
And then he’s got this move where he flies up and shoots glowing meteors. Visually, pretty neat. In practice? It’s perhaps the most unfair attack in all of gaming. There’s no way to dodge it except for luck. Rolling, shielding, running…all futile. The meteors will fall where the fall, and if you’re in the landing zone, that’s too bad. Get hit by two? Instant death, sorry. Who cares if you’ve been fighting for five minutes and have nearly won? Game over, bub!
I can’t put into enough words how horrific this fight is. And it makes me so sad knowing that such a phenomenal game as Code Vein comes to such a pitiful conclusion with this battle.
But hey, that’s just my opinion!
The Contrarian Corner 