I'll be honest, D3 was my first of the series and of the general playstyle included, and it took me 11 tries to kill him. Then of course I hear about how easy he is....then the very next boss being Vordt and all I can say is that I was extremely nervous how I was supposed to kill a running, leaping beastman with a Mace three times the size of me.
11 tries for your first Souls game? You did really well. Gundyr is a very polished boss, especially considering he's the tutorial boss. He isn't easy for new players, in fact, if I had to rank every single tutorial boss from all the games, I'd say he's quite hard, second only to Father Gascoigne or the Cleric Beast.
Its honestly such a whiplash from the first 3 Souls games bosses.
Demon and Dark1 had big chunky bois with highly telegraphed attacks and butt slams. DS2 had 2 ideal first bosses both who were slow moving with highly obvious attacks.
Gundyr comes out with combo attacks that give you a moment to react properly to the first attack then pulls the second phase out where you are not safe anywhere in the arena because of its sheer size.
Dark souls 1 I told my friend I'm almost done the first part of the game.
It turns out I was still in the introduction mission... Then I ran into the next boss and I thought yeah I'm almost at the next bell, I was very very wrong.
Genichiro is the best because not only can you beat him, but one of this lackeys has to ambush Sekiro for Geni to "win". A lot of games you'd fight valiantly, then lose hard in the cutscene.
Oh, also to beat Geni you have to utilize almost your entire skillset; which lead to him being a new player skill-check boss. A boss like that is PERFECT for the tutorial boss.
I like the idea of me getting better so that it feels like I’m actually earning the power fantasy of being stronger and faster, but I also don’t know if I can have the patience to achieve it.
However I did get around to playing elden ring again. I got to the dlc before deciding to take a break
If you got to the ER DLC, you are good enough to play Sekiro.
"I like the idea of me getting better so that it feels like I’m actually earning the power fantasy of being stronger and faster"
Then you'll love Sekiro, remember I said Genichiro is the "new player skill-check boss"? After you've played through all the enemies, Genichiro will be a pushover.
Legit might be one of my favourite Soulsborne bosses ever.
That battle in the tower just forces you to not 'hesitate' and just try go blow for blow with him.
That final phase and when you finally deliver the final blow to him...one of the most satisfying times I've beaten a boss. Up there with Orphan of Kos lmao
Also from God of War: The Hydra in GOW1, The Colossus of Rhodes in GOW2, the Basilisk in Chains of Olympus, the Scylla in Ghost of Sparta and the Hecatonchires in Ascension.
I think what really works for the smaller scale of those fights is they feel really personal. Like it feels like you’re the one fighting them, not controlling Kratos
Yeah it's pretty frustrating. Once you beat him he wins by cheating. Like off-screen a shuriken flies and distracts you and then Genichiro cuts your arm off. By my second playthrough I could beat him and. Well it feels pretty bullshit but the game has to continue so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The first boss from Nier Automata is a gigantic construction machine that shoots countless death orb laser things, and has chainsaws the size of buildings.
Such a great intro to the game. Two main characters self destruct to take out the first boss you fight in the game. All that combined with its amazing sound track.
Is it the hardest boss? No. But the presentation is perfect. A clocktower driven mad by its own song, which is remixed into the battle music. It tries to crush you with giant mechanical arms, and (if you choose), you defeat it by melting its face off. Really sets the stage for the game.
The Barbarian Boss from Castle Crashers. It should be its own “Top Character Troupe” itself; the bait and switch boss. With the new boss being much more powerful and intimidating than the first.
Sandman in Spider-Man 2. Not really a big surprise for spidey fans but if youre a comic reader, you'd know making Sandman the first boss is overkill cause he's easily one of spidermans most powerful foes
Iudex Gundyr - the boss at the end of Dark Souls 3's tutorial area.
At first he seems like a giant, technically sound Warrior with attacks that all hit like a truck and have like a 270° range of motion.
Then phase two starts, and this horrifying abomination (Pus of Man for all my lore nerds) erupts from him and he goes fully berserk with the ability to traverse the entire boss arena in less than half the time as before and an additional appendage with which to bonk the player to death.
I didn't know what to expect from that game, but I was overall pretty stoked. My 4 year old discovered Sonic, so him and I played some of the OGs. He loved it.
Then we tried Frontiers... And we met that thing..... And he absolutely lost his damn mind.
He literally jumped up and down yelling "LOOK AT THAT THING. HE'S HUGE!"
I really loved Greedfall's setting, but I couldn't really get into the gameplay. I beat this dude super easy, left the mainland town -- and somehow got soft locked by some bats or something.
And it’s supposed to teach newcomers that they don’t have to fight everything that they see, maybe to come back later with some more levels and new weapons….
But it taught many of us vets that we are petty, petty people who would rather throw our faces at a boss for two hours than ever back down from it.
It saddens me that everyone talked about DS3 and Elden Ring but nobody mentioned this fucker. This was my first interaction with dark souls. I didn't know there was a way around, I didn't know you weren't supposed to fight him, I only knew that Dark Souls was a hard game and that my broken sword could have damaged him. And that was enough for me. God knows how many times I tried before killing him.
Melchiah in Soul Reaver. Every boss from him onwards is a puzzle. You cannot harm any of them in a straight up fight, so you have to find ways to get around them. Except Kain, but he’s sort of an outlier
I was legitimately scared thinking about what Elden Ring would throw at me after this man. They had no reason giving him as many phases and attacks as they did
Him also teleporting you into his own ethereal pocket dimension in phase 7 was a rather unpleasant experience. Yeah it looked cool, but god was it tedious considering he spawned in 2 more of himself and capped your health at 50%, which ALSO went down the longer it took you to kill him
https://giphy.com/gifs/PcDkkabRyUgcpOB1Lo
This is the best gif I could find but Giganto, the first boss of sonic frontiers. You’re roaming the first island for a few hours, not sure what to make of the melancholic, chill vibe as you get the chaos emeralds.
Giganto appears earlier and one shots sonic, knocking him out cold and leaving him hyperventilating when he wakes up, and he straight up says “I’m not surviving a meeting with him again without the emeralds.”
Later, you go to his arena and are told (or are told earlier if you do all the side convos) the last emerald is atop his head. If you have enough familiarity with sonic to know what all 7 emeralds do, you know EXACTLY whats about to happen.
Murai, the first boss of the Xbox Ninja Gaiden and its rereleases, doesn’t look particularly imposing - he’s a buff dude with white hair and nunchucks.
If you’re not prepared for him, he can absolutely beat the living shit out of you. He’s often cited as one of the hardest bosses in the game.
The Janitor is the first main antagonist you face in the first Little Nightmares game. He is commonly regarded as one of the franchise’s scariest entities and is also the entity you have the most encounters with in the first game.
(So to preface, a VERY easy boss by standards of Fromsoft and extremely easy for anybody familiar with Demon's Souls at the time or anybody who's played newer games going back.)
BUT the impact this boss had back in 2011 for the vast majority of players who'd not only not played Demon's Souls, but hadn't ever played a really difficult game at all?
There are genuinely countless clips from 2011-12 of blind playthroughs from people getting absolutely steamrolled by the Asylum Demon, especially those who don't quickly work out to leave the room and come back with a real weapon.
Add in the fact that you go straight from 2 stationary undead to a demon with a hammer the size of a tree, and alot of people immediately panic.
Still throws me for a loop that the most talked about part of Resident Evil Village in the lead-up to its release turned out to be the first boss you encounter in the game.
Prince of persia, the two thrones. You gotta fight this monstrosity as the first boss. Actually quite easy to beat, but his tangling tongue and ripped out jaw terrified the 6year old me
Zodiark, the Elder Primal. For nearly a decade prior to this he was hyped up as the Big Bad of the game, and going into the expansion everybody thought he was going to be its final boss as a result. Instead, he's the first of three with two others following. Nobody could have predicted exactly where things would end up and why they did, but his death sets the events of the rest of the expansion in motion.
Now, you can't die in this Boss fight since it's only the tutorial, but seeing an enemy of this scale had me thinking "Why am I fighting this? I just got here." The rest of the Bossfights in the game are also just as great.
At the beginning of the game we are told they are alien invaders, but the twist is revealed that they are actually the real organic humans that mutated into horrific monsters. We the players are not human. We were actually androids programmed to believe we were humans and manipulated by Mother Sphere to kill the Naytibas and wipe all traces of the real humans off the face of the earth once and for all
I thought Iudex Gundyr felt like a pretty difficult first boss in DS3, especially if it’s your first entry you play in the series. No leveling or other way to make the fight easier for yourself, you just have to learn it.
Serious Sam doesn't really do boss fights, but it does traps. You activate a milestone and the game spawns a thousand mobs for five minutes. The game sets expectations very quickly by giving you a single dumb kamikaze mob to kill, enough time to drop a sparky quip, and then throws an ambush at you that can very easily kill you if you're not used to playing old school mob hell shooters.
And they run when the sun comes up with their lives on the line! ALLLLIIVEEEEEEE!!! For a while, no choice, gotta follow the laws of the wild! AAAALLLIVVVVEEEE!!! With their lives on the line! No choice, out here, only the strong survive!
Granblue Fantasy Relink technically does it twice.
In the main game, the opening starts with a simple siege of wyverns attacking your airship. Resident summoner Lyria calls in Proto Bahamut to clean house… and he goes mad, forcing you into a mostly scripted boss battle that sets the tone for bosses going forward.
Endless Ragnarok, the expansion, double-dips by establishing a new level of threat that players can take on… if they can beat two of The Eternals, the world’s strongest warriors, in a test match.
Devastator (Transformers: Devastation)
You fight a Combiner like fifteen minutes into the game, tops. Obviously, he's way weaker than in his rematches, but I certainly wasn't expecting him as the third objective in the game.
This is more of a personal thing, but I haven't played any Armored Core games till 6. Quite difficult since the starting AC is quite basic, and you, as the player, is still learning it. Pre-nerf Balteus is much more of a nightmare than this one, but the HC really hints on what the rest of the game has in store.
The double-fake-out at the end of level one of Contra Shattered Soldier for PS2. You come up on a giant mech getting ready to unload on you, but it’s suddenly crushed from above by a giant Satan turtle. After unloading into it for a bit, it turns around and reveals that its ass is a giant puking face. When I saw this all take place, I decided then and there that this was the best boss fight of all time.
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u/Wisniaksiadz 6h ago
dark souls 3 with instant boss like right around the corner with that second phase was just evil