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[fraxcell]

Sniper Wolf in the first MGS is another emotional encounter (especially the second time you fight her).

I also think Big Daddies should be mentioned here. My encounters with them were always pretty memorable, and although they got pretty easy to kill near the end of the game, your first few encounters with a Big Daddy provided a great context to try out different elements of the game. Hacking turrets and sentry robots, enraging splicers, and setting up mines was almost required to defeat them.

[Paint by Numbers]

I really don't care what a boss is like so long as I find it interesting for some reason. Whether it looks awesome, is particularly fun, has an intriguingly different mode of defeat, has emotional value, or is really, really big, I like it.

Come to think of it, I have never met a boss battle I didn't like. Well, some of the bosses in Cave Story are too hard to make me want to play the game again for fear of getting stuck at them.

Here are my thoughts on final bosses:

If a game is very serious or plot-driven, a final boss that is not the most difficult enemy in the game can be forgiven if it has emotional impact. Otherwise, however, I like the final boss of a game to be the biggest, most dramatically grand enemy in the game. I like Serious Sam's final boss, Ugh-Zan III. The whole game is about facing down entire armies of enemies at the same time. Ugh-Zan III is a comically huge monster with a comically large resistance to your attacks. He has four arms, each holding a weapon, and he can also regenerate. If I recall correctly, he's something like a double puzzle boss. Also, before you can even attack him properly, you have to run away from him, because if he were to reach you he would step on you.

If a game is not too serious, that is what a final boss should be.