Ask Lemmy

Nameless king. I finally caved and accepted I would have to summon to beat him... Ah fuck.

The only soulsborne I didn't beat, but I didn't play after getting hard stuck on him. I did beat everyone solo though, which is why it was such a decision to think about summoning.

The last boss in Tears of the Kingdom comes to mind. Too damn hard for me, and my motivation to try over and over was low since I knew it was the end of the game. That's happened with a lot of final bosses for me. "I could spend a lot of time beating it, but why? The game is basically over."

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.

Battletoads. I thought me and my brother were just retarded or something until.I grew up, got the internet, and learned that it was one of the most unforgivingly brutal games of our era.

Top Gun (1987)

Lavos in Chrono Trigger. 😭

Celeste

There's one screen that's just keeeeps going in the very last level, shit took me like 20-30 hours spread over two weeks

Metroid Dread was my first exposure to "tough but fair" bosses where every defeat felt earned. Every single boss took multiple tries, and every time I went through this cycle of trying a few times, walking away, debating whether I should quit altogether, only to come back a day or so later to repeat the process. I beat the entire game. Ravenbeak was of course the hardest, but man it felt good when I finally beat him.

I had a similar experience playing through various Soulslikes. The only other one I managed to beat was Tunic (I know I talk about that game a lot. It left quite the impression).

Undine the Undying.

Gwyn in Dark Souls.

The problem was my biggest success. I managed to score a zweihander, pretty early on in the game. I upgraded the hell out of it and was able to clear most bosses with some grinding and a lot of determination. I did this with a failing PS3 controller that generated spurious inputs, resulting in randomly switching to my alt config (unarmed) if I squeezed the controller too hard. I even learned a new level of personal zen and patience after realizing that getting angry would make me perform worse. I got gud.

Then I arrive at the end boss and get absolutely wrecked.

Why? I never had to parry. Not. A. Single. Time. Strike, juke, medium-roll, retreat, strike again. Don't be a target, and keep moving. Meanwhile, every guide to beat Gwyn says you have to parry his attacks. I basically had little choice but to retrain how to play my character modifying an entire game's worth of muscle-memory in the process.

My save file has been in this condition for years at this point.

The fucking Dark Souls 3 Ballerina. It took me hours and hours and it fucking sucked. Love her though, such fun attack patterns.

I barely remember it, but I remember that the hardest mode of Shinobi was ridiculous. Basically just had to memorize and execute a perfect movement / attack pattern.

And if memory serves, it was like 2 levels before the final one that was actually the hardest on the hardest difficulty? Getting flooded with some kind of tricky enemy while way in the air?

But then you unlocked God mode and got to just slaughter everything with your OP abilities and sword... actually I think there were at least two levels of those upgrades. One had a life draining effect and the next was just absurd

Oh yeah! And some of the songs on Amplitude

Joker in Batman for the NES. It took forever to get to him, and it was too easy to mess it up

I might have beat him, not sure, might have used debug mode. 0 rings? 12 hits? Spike arms? Blegh.

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.

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.

PS2 Shinobi. That game was brutally hard.

I've never technically beaten the final Bowser boss in Super Mario 64. Me and my siblings grew up with the game as kids. I remember us having 114 out of 120 stars. We were trying really hard to 100% the game, then I think it was our nephews who ended up deleting our save. That was a sad day.

We never did find the second secret slide. I only found where it was once my best friend showed me the location as adults.

Gozer in Ghostbusters for the Master System.

As with any game of that era you had to play through the whole game with no save to reach the last boss. Sometimes you’d get taken out before reaching Gozer by the poltergeists on the stairs.

Then finally you’d have a few seconds to figure out what was going on before you were one-shot-killed by a projectile, with very like time to work out where you could have moved to.

I’ve still never truly beaten Gozer, but finally used save states to finish the game on my Anbernic a couple of years ago, meaning it took me about 30 years to see the ending.

Rodney, the Wizard of Yendor

@

In terms of total time since I first played the game to finally beating it, probably Cave Story's Ballos fight for me. I had a fan made port of the game for the PSP back in '06 ish, struggled a lot to get the regular ending, found out about the true ending, and couldn't ever beat the Last Cave (Hidden), much less gauntlet of challenges beyond it. I think at the most I had seen that there was a secret area beyond the "final boss" for the true ending and the fan name for it, but never been. I might have once gotten to it but I know for certain I never ever beat it or the true final boss.

At some point around about 2018 ish I think I saw that they had a rerelease for the game on the Switch titled Cave Story+, where I fell in love with the game all over again and finally played it to its true completion. I still have all of the screenshots and videos I took during my first completion of that boss fight. I think since then I have beaten it on Hard Mode, but only ever on the Switch version with Co-op mode which allows you to double your damage output being that you have 2 players, so it'll be interesting trying to go back and complete it again soon without almost any Health pickups at all.

Metroid Prime on the game cube. I've played through that game multiple times over the decades and never could finish off the Metroid Prime boss at the end. I got so very close a handful of times, but could never finish her off.

I gave up on the final boss of Minish Cap. I was playing the game on the Wii U.

Ruby and Emerald. That's when I knew that I would never 100% a game in my life. Even with the game guide, those fights can fuck right off.

Renoir, 2nd fight.

The final boss of the Who Framed Roger Rabbit NES game. That was some unfair BS!

There's like 10 years between starting Pokémon Red and beating the final four for me. I didn't have the guide books but eventually it was easy to get help from the internet for a handful of hangups. I put it down for a long time somewhere after like 4 gyms, came back years later, and spent maybe 6 months playing on the commute

The aircraft carrier landing in top gun

Troupe Master Grimm in Hollow Knight

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...

The tank in Arkham Knight on the Xbox 360. I spent hours trying to get past it. Finally looked online and others were saying it took them days to get past it. Decided I didn't like the game enough to put that much effort into one fight.

That bird in Karatka. I'm told it isn't hard but I could never get the timing right.

Smough and Ornstein...took me three days to beat them. Never. Again.

There's boss fights occasionally in Dave the Diver and they just. I hate all of them lol. There was one at night I kept having to reload and just hope the weapon it gave me was the one that I was decent enough at that I finally got it.

Wasn't a boss but an achievement in the original geometry wars. Score 10 million without dying. It took me about two years to get that and I would play it at least once a night if I could.

Three I can think of

Rebel Flagship from FTL: Faster Than Light

I fucking hate FTL and everybody hails it as the best thing since sliced bread for effectively inventing the roguelike genre. It's an incredibly poorly balanced game that boils down to travelling across each sector, bouncing between beacons, fighting hostile ships, encountering random events and whether you choose to engage with these events, rolling the die and (more times than not) getting screwed over by dogshit RNG.

I've only reached the Last Stand twice. On the first time, I engaged the Rebel Flagship, had over half my health taken out in a few shots then decided to retreat. Retreating triggered an instant Game Over because the game was glitched. The second time around, I made it to the second phase before dying.

This is how rough the game is on Normal mode...

Xemnas from Kingdom Hearts 2

This is more like me not having the patience to learn the fight. Roxas had already worn me the fuck down, and the only way I got past him was to effectively cheese the fight with Megalixirs, Limit Form and Ars Arcanum spam, which is easier said than done. I not only had to grind my drive forms up significantly beforehand, but I also had to intentionally manipulate the game's RNG so as to not trigger Anti Form at any point in the fight.

Xemnas is like a far more bullshit version of Ansem from KH1, in the respect that both are lengthy multi-phase fights that can take 20 - 30 minutes under normal circumstances, but unlike Ansem, his Nobody counterpart now has the ability to drive you down to 1HP with an unavoidable QTE attack where he launches a flurry of combos which you have to perfect parry.

And I think generally, Kingdom Hearts 2 is an objectively worse game than the first one in almost every respect, aside from the fluidity of its combat system. It has serious difficulty spikes, some incredibly bullshit boss mechanics, lacks the interactive game world that the first game had, gave us a substantially worse version of Atlantica that plays like a cringe Little Mermaid sing-along rhythm game, has substantially worse gummi ship sections, and unlike the first game, and it generally began the point where the plot of the entire franchise would start turning into a confusing clusterfuck.

And it's not like I'm bad at Kingdom Hearts games either. Riku 2 took me a grand total of two attempts to beat in the first game, and the way I was able to beat both Riku fights so easily was because I learned quickly not to execute a full keyblade combo on him and cancel right before the last swing, because he will do an undodgeable counter. Also, Riku 2's ultimate attack can be easily dodged by just jumping up and gliding around the arena. Even Sephiroth (the game's bonus superboss) is pretty easy with healing items or Leaf Bracer/Curaga.

Elder Princess Shroob from Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

Superstar Saga was a masterpiece. Its sequel on the other hand is linear as fuck, has bad writing, is ruined by the Baby Mario Bros who wear the same red and green outfits as their adult counterparts and therefore make Bros Moves substantially hard to pull off (as it's easy to get A/X and B/Y mixed up.)

For me it's the game that killed the Mario & Luigi series.

I could never get past the final boss and I'm convinced that my copy of the game is either glitched or she was designed to be a damage sponge. I genuinely gave up after one attempt took me well over half an hour only for me to die.